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LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


[trout] 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

A PSYCHOSEXUAL  STUDY  OF  AN 
INFANTILE  REMINISCENCE 


BY 

PROFESSOR  DR.  SIGMUND  FREUD,  LL.D. 

(UNIVERSITY  OF  VIENNA) 

TRANSLATED  BY 

A.  A.  BRILL.  Ph.B.,  M.D. 

Lecturer  in  Psychoanalysis  and  Abnormal 
Psychology,  New  York  University 


NEW  YORK 

MOFFAT,  YARD  & COMPANY 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Leonardo  Da  Vinci Frontispiece 

FACING 

FACE 

Mona  Lisa  . 78 

Saint  Anne 86 

Jolm  the  Baptist  94 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

i 

When  psychoanalytic  investigation,  which 
usually  contents  itself  with  frail  human  mate- 
rial, approaches  the  great  personages  of  hu- 
manity, it  is  not  impelled  to  it  by  motives  which 
are  often  attributed  to  it  by  laymen.  It  does 
not  strive  “to  blacken  the  radiant  and  to  drag 
the  sublime  into  the  mire” ; it  finds  no  satisfac- 
tion in  diminishing  the  distance  between  the 
perfection  of  the  great  and  the  inadequacy  of 
the  ordinary  objects.  But  it  cannot  help  find- 
ing that  everything  is  worthy  of  understanding 
that  can  be  perceived  through  those  prototypes, 
and  it  also  believes  that  none  is  so  big  as  to  be 
ashamed  of  being  subject  to  the  laws  which  con- 
trol the  normal  and  morbid  actions  with  the 
same  strictness. 

Leonardo  da  Vinci  (1452-1519)  was  ad- 


1 


2 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


mired  even  by  his  contemporaries  as  one  of  the 
greatest  men  of  the  Italian  Renaissance,  still 
even  then  he  appeared  as  mysterious  to  them  as 
he  now  appears  to  us.  An  all-sided  genius, 
“whose  form  can  only  be  divined  but  never 
deeply  fathomed,”  1 he  exerted  the  most  deci- 
sive influence  on  his  time  as  an  artist ; and  it  re- 
mained to  us  to  recognize  his  greatness  as  a 
naturalist  which  was  united  in  him  with  the 
artist-  Although  he  left  masterpieces  of  the 
art  of  painting,  while  his  scientific  discoveries 
remained  unpublished  and  unused,  the  investi- 
gator in  him  has  never  quite  left  the  artist, 
often  it  has  severely  injured  the  artist  and  in 
the  end  it  has  perhaps  suppressed  the  artist 
altogether.  According  to  Vasari,  Leonardo 
reproached  himself  during  the  last  hour  of  his 
life  for  having  insulted  God  and  men  because 
he  has  not  done  his  duty  to  his  art.2  And  even 
if  Vasari's  story  lacks  all  probability  and  be- 
longs to  those  legends  which  began  to  be  woven 
about  the  mystic  master  while  he  was  still  liv- 

1 In  the  words  of  J.  Burckhard,  cited  by  Alexandra  Kon- 
stantmowa.  Die  Entwicklung  des  Madonnentypus  by  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  Strassburg,  igo7- 

2 Vite,  cte,  LXXXI1L  1550-1584. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


3 


mg,  it  nevertheless  retains  indisputable  value 
as  a testimonial  of  the  judgment  of  those  peo- 
ple and  of  those  times. 

What  was  it  that  removed  the  personality  of 
Leonardo  from  the  understanding  of  his  con- 
temporaries? Certainly  not  the  many  sided 
ness  of  his  capacities  and  knowledge,  which  al- 
lowed him  to  install  himself  as  a player  of  the 
lyre  on  an  instrument  invented  by  himself,  in 
the  court  of  Lodovico  Sforza,  nicknamed  11 
Moro,  the  Duke  of  Milan,  or  which  allowed 
him  to  write  to  the  same  person  that  remark- 
able letter  in  which  he  boasts  of  Ms  abilities  as 
a civil  and  military  engineer.  For  the  combi- 
nation of  manifold  talents  in  the  same  person 
was  not  unusual  in  the  times  of  the  Renais- 
sance; to  be  sure  Leonardo  himself  furnished 
one  of  the  most  splendid  examples  of  such  per- 
sons. Nor  did  he  belong  to  that  type  of  genial 
persons  who  are  outwardly  poorly  endowed  by 
nature,  and  who  on  their  side  place  no  value  on 
the  outer  forms  of  life,  and  in  the  painful 
gloominess  of  their  feelings  fly  from  human 
relations.  On  the  contrary  he  was  tall  and 
symmetrically  built,  of  consummate  beauty  of 


4 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


countenance  and  of  unusual  physical  strengtn, 
he  was  charming  in  his  manner,  a master  of 
speech  and  jovial  and  affectionate  to  every- 
body. He  loved  beauty  in  the  objects  of  his 
surroundings,  he  was  fond  of  wearing  magnifi- 
cent garments  and  appreciated  every  refine- 
ment of  conduct.  In  his  treatise  3 on  the  art 
of  painting  he  compares  in  a significant  pas- 
sage the  art  of  painting  with  its  sister  arts  and 
thus  discusses  the  difficulties  of  the  sculptor: 
“Now  his  faoe  is  entirely  smeared  and  pow- 
dered with  marble  dust,  so  that  he  looks  like  a 
baker,  he  is  covered  with  small  marble  splin- 
ters, so  that  it  seems  as  if  it  snowed  on  his 
back,  and  his  house  is  full  of  stone  splinters, 
and  dust.  The  case  of  the  painter  is  quite  dif- 
ferent from  that;  for  the  painter  is  well 
dressed  and  sits  with  great  comfort  before  his 
work,  he  gently  and  very  lightly  brushes  in  the 
beautiful  colors.  He  wears  as  decorative 
clothes  as  he  likes,  and  his  house  is  filled  with 
beautiful  paintings  and  is  spotlessly  clean.  He 
often  enjoys  company,  music,  or  some  one  may 

3Traktat  von  der  Malerei,  new  edition  and  introduction  by 
Marie  Herzfeld,  E.  Diederichs,  Jena,  1909. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


5 


read  for  him  various  nice  works,  and  all  this 
can  be  listened  to  with  great  pleasure,  undis- 
turbed by  any  pounding  from  the  hammer  and 
other  noises/’ 

It  is  quite  possible  that  the  conception  of  a 
beaming  jovial  and  happy  Leonardo  was  true 
only  for  the  first  and  longer  period  of  the  mas- 
ter’s life.  From  now  on,  when  the  downfall 
of  the  rule  of  Lodovico  Moro  forced  him  to 
leave  Milan,  his  sphere  of  action  and  his  as- 
sured position,  to  lead  an  unsteady  and  unsuc- 
cessful life  until  his  last  asylum  in  France,  it 
is  possible  that  the  luster  of  his  disposition  be- 
came pale  and  some  odd  features  of  his  char- 
acter became  more  prominent.  The  turning  of 
his  interest  from  his  art  to  science  which  in- 
creased with  age  must  have  also  been  respon- 
sible for  widening  the  gap  between  himself 
and  his  contemporaries.  All  his  efforts  with 
which,  according  to  their  opinion,  he  wasted  his 
time  instead  of  diligently  filling  orders  and  be- 
coming rich  as  perhaps  his  former  classmate 
Perugino,  seemed  to  his  contemporaries  as  ca- 
pricious playing,  or  even  caused  them  to  sus- 
pect him  of  being  in  the  service  of  the  “black 


6 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


art,”  We  who  know  him  from  his  sketches 
understand  him  better.  In  a time  in  which  the 
authority  of  the  church  began  to  be  substituted 
by  that  of  antiquity  and  in  which  only  theo- 
retical investigation  existed,  he  the  forerunner, 
or  better  the  worthy  competitor  of  Bacon  and 
Copernicus,  was  necessarily  isolated.  When 
he  dissected  cadavers  of  horses  and  human  be- 
ings, and  built  flying  apparatus,  or  when  he 
studied  the  nourishment  of  plants  and  their  be- 
havior towards  poisons,  he  naturally  deviated 
much  from  the  commentators  of  Aristotle  and 
came  nearer  the  despised  alchemists,  in  whose 
laboratories  the  experimental  investigations 
found  some  refuge  during  these  unfavorable 
times. 

The  effect  that  this  had  on  his  paintings  was 
that  he  disliked  to  handle  the  brush,  he  painted 
less  and  what  was  more  often  the  case,  the 
things  he  began  were  mostly  left  unfinished ; he 
cared  less  and  less  for  the  future  fate  of  his 
works.  It  was  this  mode  of  working  that  was 
held  up  to  him  &s  a reproach  from  his  contem- 
poraries to  whom  his  behavior  to  his  art  re- 
mained a riddle. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


7 


Many  of  Leonardo's  later  admirers  have  at- 
tempted to  wipe  off  the  stain  of  unsteadiness 
from  his  character.  They  maintained  that 
what  is  blamed  in  Leonardo  is  a general  char- 
acteristic of  great  artists.  They  said  that  even 
the  energetic  Michelangelo  who  was  absorbed 
in  his  work  left  many  incompleted  works, 
which  was  as  little  due  to  his  fault  as  to  Leo- 
nardo's m the  same  case.  Besides  some  pic- 
tures were  not  as  tinfinished  as  he  claimed,  and 
what  the  layman  would  call  a masterpiece  may 
still  appear  to  the  creator  of  the  work  of  art  as 
an  unsatisfied  embodiment  of  his  intentions;  he 
has  a faint  notion  of  a perfection  which  he  de- 
spairs of  reproducing  in  likeness.  Least  of  all 
should  the  artist  be  held  responsible  for  the  fate 
which  befalls  his  works. 

As  plausible  as  some  of  these  excuses  may 
sound  they  nevertheless  do  not  explain  the 
whole  state  of  affairs  which  we  find  in  Leo- 
nardo. The  painful  struggle  with  the  work, 
the  final  flight  from  it  and  the  indifference  to  its 
future  fate  may  be  seen  in  many  other  artists, 
but  this  behavior  is  shown  in  Leonardo  to  high- 


8 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


est  degree.  Edm.  Solmi 4 cites  (p.  12)  the  ex- 
pression of  one  of  his  pupils : “Pareva,  che  ad 

ogni  ora  tremasse,  quando  si  poneva  a dipin- 
gere,  e pero  no  diede  mai  fine  ad  alcuna  cosa 
cominciata,  considerando  la  grandezza  dell’arte, 
tal  che  egli  scorgeva  errori  in  quelle  cose,  che 
ad  altri  parevano  miracoli.”  His  last  pic- 
tures, Leda,  the  Madonna  di  Saint  Onofrio, 
Bacchus  and  St.  John  the  Baptist,  remained 
unfinished  “come  quasi  intervenne  di  tutte  le 
cose  sue.”  Lomazzo,5  who  finished  a copy  of 
The  Holy  Supper,  refers  in  a sonnet  to  the  fa- 
miliar inability  of  Leonardo  to  finish  his  works : 

“Protogen  che  ii  penel  di  sue  pitture 
Non  levava,  agguaglio  il  Vinci  Divo, 

Di  cui  opra  non  e finita  pure.” 

The  slowness  with  which  Leonardo  worked 
was  proverbial.  After  the  most  thorough  pre- 
liminary studies  he  painted  The  Holy  Supper 
for  three  years  in  the  cloister  of  Santa  Maria 

4 Solmi.  La  resurrezionc  delC  opera  di  Leonardo  in  the  col- 
lected work;  Leonardo  da  Vinci.  Conferenze  Florentine, 
Milan,  1910. 

5 Scognamiglio  Ricerche  e Doeumenti  sulla  eiovinezza  di 
Leonardo  da  Vinci.  Napoli,  1900. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


9 


delle  Grazie  in  Milan.  One  of  his  contem- 
poraries, Matteo  Bandelli,  the  writer  of  novels, 
who  was  then  a young  monk  in  the  cloister,  re- 
lates that  Leonardo  often  ascended  the  scaffold 
very  early  in  the  morning  and  did  not  leave  the 
brush  out  of  his  hand  until  twilight,  never 
thinking  of  eating  or  drinking.  Then  days 
passed  without  putting  his  hand  on  it,  some- 
times he  remained  for  hours  before  the  paint- 
ing and  derived  satisfaction  from  studying  it 
by  himself.  At  other  times  he  came  directly 
to  the  cloister  from  the  palace  of  the  Milanese 
Castle  where  he  formed  the  mode)  of  the  eques- 
trian statue  for  Francesco  Sforza,  in  order  to 
add  a few  strokes  with  the  brush  to  one  of  the 
figures  and  then  stopped  immediately.6  Ac- 
cording to  Vasari  he  worked  for  years  on  the 
portrait  of  Monna  Lisa,  the  wife  of  the  Floren- 
tine de  Gioconda,  without  being  able  to  bring 
it  to  completion.  This  circumstance  may  also 
account  for  the  fact  that  it  was  never  delivered 
to  the  one  who  ordered  it  but  remained 
with  Leonardo  who  took  it  with  him  to 

6 W.  v.  Seidlitz.  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  der  Wendepunkt  d?r 
Renaissance*  1909,  Bd.  I,  p.  203. 


io  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

France.7  Having  been  procured  by  King 
Francis  I,  it  now  forms  one  of  the  greatest 
treasures  of  the  Louvre. 

When  one  compares  these  reports  about 
Leonardo's  way  of  working  with  the  evidence 
of  the  extraordinary  amount  of  sketches  and 
studies  left  by  him,  one  is  bound  altogether  to 
reject  the  idea  that  traits  of  flightiness  and 
unsteadiness  exerted  the  slightest  influence  on 
Leonardo^  relation  to  his  art.  On  the  con- 
trary one  notices  a very  extraordinary  absorp- 
tion in  work,  a richness  in  possibilities  in  which 
a decision  could  be  reached  only  hestitatingly, 
claims  which  could  hardly  be  satisfied,  and 
an  inhibition  in  the  execution  which  could 
not  even  be  explained  by  the  inevitable  back- 
wardness of  the  artist  behind  his  ideal  pur- 
pose. The  slowness  which  was  striking  in 
Leonardo's  works  from  the  very  beginning 
proved  to  be  a symptom  of  his  inhibition,  a 
forerunner  of  his  turning  away  from  painting 
which  manifested  itself  later,®  It  was  this 

* W.  v.  Seidlrtz,  1.  c.  Bd.  IL  p.  48. 

8W  Pater.  The  Renaissance,  p.  107  The  Macmillan  Co., 
1910-  "Rut  it  is  certain  that  at  one  period  of  his  life  he  had 
almost  ceased  to  be  an  artist.” 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


slowness  which  decided  the  not  undeserving 
fate  of  The  Holy  Supper.  Leonardo  could  not 
take  kindly  to  the  art  of  fresco  painting  which 
demands  quick  work  while  the  background 
is  still  moist,  it  was  for  this  reason  that  he 
chose  oil  colors,  the  drying  of  which  permitted 
him  to  complete  the  picture  according  to  his 
mood  and  leisure.  But  these  colors  separated 
themselves  from  the  background  upon  which 
they  were  painted  and  which  isolated  them 
from  the  brick  wall;  the  blemishes  of  this  wall 
and  the  vicissitudes  to  which  the  room  was  sub- 
jected seemingly  contributed  to  the  inevitable 
deterioration  of  the  picture.9 

The  picture  of  the  cavalry  battle  of  An- 
ghiari,  which  in  competition  with  Michelangelo 
he  began  to  paint  later  on  a wall  of  the  Sala  de 
Consiglio  in  Florence  and  which  he  also  left  in 
an  unfinished  state,  seemed  to  have  perished 
through  the  failure  of  a similar  technical  proc- 
ess. It  seems  here  as  if  a peculiar  interest, 
that  of  the  experimenter,  at  first  reenforced  the 
artistic,  only  later  to  damage  the  art  production. 

® Cf.  v Seidlitz  Bd.  I die  Geschichte  der  Restaurations  — 
und  Rettungsversuche. 


12 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


The  character  of  the  man  Leonardo  evinces 
still  some  other  unusual  traits  and  apparent 
contradictions.  Thus  a certain  inactivity  and 
indifference  seemed  very  evident  in  him*  At  a 
time  when  every  individual  sought  to  gain  the 
widest  latitude  for  his  activity,  which  could  not 
take  place  without  the  development  of  energetic 
aggression  towards  others,  he  surprised  every 
one  through  his  quiet  peacefulness,  his  shun- 
ning of  all  competition  and  controversies.  He 
was  mild  and  kind  to  all,  he  was  said  to  have 
rejected  a meat  diet  because  he  did  not  con- 
sider it  just  to  rob  animals  of  their  lives,  and 
one  of  his  special  pleasures  was  to  buy  caged 
birds  in  the  market  and  set  them  free.10  He 
condemned  war  and  bloodshed  and  designated 
man  not  so  much  as  the  king  of  the  animal 
world,  but  rather  as  the  worst  of  the  wild 
beasts.11  But  this  effeminate  delicacy  of  feel- 
ing did  not  prevent  him  from  accompanying 

10  Miintz.  Leonard  de  Vinci,  Paris,  1899.  p.  18.  (A  letter 
of  a contemporary  from  India  to  a Medici  alludes  to  this  pe- 
culiarity of  Leonardo  Given  by  Richter : The  literary  Works 
of  Leonardo  da  Vinci.) 

11  F.  Botazzi.  Leonardo  biologo  e anatomico.  Conferenze 
Florentine,  p.  186,  1910. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


13 


condemned  criminals  on  their  way  to  execution 
in  order  to  study  and  sketch  in-his  notebook 
their  features,  distorted  by  fear,  nor  did  it  pre- 
vent him  from  inventing  the  most  cruel  offen- 
sive weapons,  and  from  entering  the  service  of 
Cesare  Borgia  as  chief  military  engineer. 
Often  he  seemed  to  be  indifferent  to  good  and 
evil,  or  he  had  to  be.  measured  with  a special 
standard.  He  held  a high  position  in  Cesare's 
campaign  which  gained  for  this  most  inconsid- 
erate and  most  faithless  of  foes  the  possession 
of  the  Remagna.  Not  a single  line  of  Leonar- 
do's sketches  betrays  any  criticism  or  sympathy 
of  the  events  of  those  days.  The  comparison 
with  Goethe  during  the  French  campaign  can- 
not here  be  altogether  rejected, 

If  a biographical  effort  really  endeavors  to 
penetrate  the  understanding  of  the  psychic  life 
of  its  hero  it  must  not,  as  happens  in  most  biog^ 
raphies  through  discretion  or  prudery,  pass 
over  in  silence  the  sexual  activity  or  the  sex 
peculiarity  of  the  one  examined.  What  we 
know  about  it  in  Leonardo  is  very  little  but  fuil 
of  significance.  In  a period  where  there  was. 
a constant  struggle  between  riotous  licentious- 


M 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


ness  and  gloomy  asceticism,  Leonardo  pre- 
sented an  example  of  cool  sexual  rejection 
which  one  would  not  expect  in  an  artist  and  a 
portrayer  of  feminine  beauty.  Solmi 12  cites 
the  following  sentence  from  Leonardo  showing 
his  frigidity:  ‘The  act  of  procreation  and 

everything  that  has  any  relation  to  it  is  so  dis- 
gusting that  human  beings  would  soon  die  out 
if  it  were  not  a traditional  custom  and  if  there 
were  no  pretty  faces  and  sensuous  disposi- 
tions.” His  posthumous  works  which  not  only 
treat  of  the  greatest  scientific  problems  but  also 
comprise  the  most  guileless  objects  which  to  us 
do  not  seem  worthy  of  so  great  a mind  (an 
allegorical  natural  history,  animal  fables,  wit- 
ticisms, prophecies),13  are  chaste  to  a degree- 
one  might  say  abstinent— that  in  a work  of 
belle  lettres  would  excite  wonder  even  to-day. 
They  evade  everything  sexual  so  thoroughly, 
as  if  Eros  alone  who  preserves  everything  liv- 
ing was  no  worthy  material  for  the  scientific 

12  £.  Solmi:  Leonardo  da  Vinci  German  Translation  by 
Emmi  Hirschberg.  Berlin,  190S 

18  Marie  Herzfeld : Leonardo  da  Vinci  der  Denker, 
Forscher  und  Poet.  Second  edition.  Jena,  1906. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


*5 


impulse  of  the  investigator.14  It  is  known  how 
frequently  great  artists  found  pleasure  in  giv- 
ing vent  to  their  phantasies  in  erotic  and  even 
grossly  obscene  representations;  in  contradis- 
tinction to  this  Leonardo  left  only  some  ana™ 
tomical  drawings  of  the  woman's  internal  gen- 
itals, the  position  of  the  child  in  the  womb,  etc* 
It  is  doubtful  whether  Leonardo  ever  em- 
braced a woman  in  love,  nor  is  it  known  that 
he  ever  entertained  an  intimate  spiritual  rela- 
tion with  a woman  as  in  the  case  of  Michel- 
angelo and  Yittoria  Colonna*  While  he  still 
lived  as  an  apprentice  in  the  house  of  his  mas- 
ter Verrocchio,  he  with  other  young  men  were 
accused  of  forbidden  homosexual  relations 
which  ended  in  his  acquittal.  It  seems  that  he 
came  into  this  suspicion  because  he  employed 
as  a model  a boy  of  evil  repute.15  When  he 
was  a master  he  surrounded  himself  with  hand- 

14  His  collected  witticisms— belle  facezie,— which  are  not 
translated,  may  be  an  exception.  Cf.  Herzfeld,  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  p.  15X. 

15  According  to  Scognamiglio  (I.  c.  p.  49)  reference  is  made 
to  this  episode  in  an  obscure  and  even  variously  interpreted 
passage  of  the  Codex  Atlanticus : “Quando  io  feci  Domened- 
dio  putto  voi  mi  mettcste  in  prigione,  ora  s"io  lo  fo  grande, 
voi  mi  farete  peggio.” 


i6 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


some  boys  and  youths  whom  he  took  as  pupils. 
The  last  of  these  pupils  Francesco  Melzi,  ac- 
companied him  to  France,  remained  with  him 
until  his  death,  and  was  named  by  him  as  his 
heir.  Without  sharing  the  certainty  of  his 
modern  biographers,  who  naturally  reject  the 
possibility  of  a sexual  relation  between  himself 
and  his  pupils  as  a baseless  insult  to  this  great 
man,  it  may  be  thought  by  far  more  probable 
that  the  affectionate  relationships  of  Leonardo 
to  the  young  men  did  not  result  in  sexual  ac- 
tivity. Nor  should  one  attribute  to  him  a high 
measure  of  sexual  activity. 

The  peculiarity  of  this  emotional  and  sex- 
ual life  viewed  in  connection  with  Leonar- 
do's double  nature  as  an  artist  and  investiga- 
tor can  be  grasped  only  in  one  way.  Of  the 
biographers  to  whom  psychological  viewpoints 
are  often  very  foreign,  only  one,  Edm.  Soltni, 
has  to  my  knowledge  approached  the  solu- 
tion cf  the  riddle.  But  a writer,  Dimitri 
Sergewitsch  Merejkowski,  who  selected  Leo- 
nardo as  the  hero  of  a great  historical  novel 
has  based  his  delineation  on  such  an  under* 
standing  of  this  unusual  man,  and  if  not  in  dry 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


17 


words  he  gave  unmistakable  utterance  in  plas- 
tic expression  in  the  manner  of  a poet/6  Solmi 
judges  Leonardo  as  follows:  “But  the  unre- 

quited desire  to  understand  everything'  sur- 
rounding him?  and  with  cold  reflection  to  dis 
coyer  the  deepest  secret  of  everything  that  is 
perfect,  has  condemned  Leonardo's  works  to 
remain  forever  unfinished/’ 17  In  an  essay  of 
the  Conferenze  Florentine  the  utterances  of 
Leonardo  are  cited,  which  show  his  confession 
of  faith  and.  furnish  the  key  to  his  character, 

“Nessuna  cosa  si  pub  am  are  ne  odiare , se 
prima  no  si  ha  cognition  di  quella”  18 

That  is:  One  has  no  right  to  love  or  to 

hate  anything  if  one  has  not  acquired  a thor- 
ough knowledge  of  its  nature.  And  the  same 
is  repeated  by  Leonardo  in  a passage  of  the 
T reaties  on  the  Art  of  Painting  where  he  seems 

16  Merejkowski:  The  Romance  o Leonardo  da  Vinci, 
translated  by  Herbert  Trench,  G.  P.  Putnam  Sons,  New  York. 
It  fcrm«  the  second  of  the  historical  Trilogy  entitled  Christ 
and  Anti-Christ,  of  which  the  first  volume  is  Julian  Apostata, 
and  the  third  volume  is  Peter  the  Craat  and  Alexei. 

17  Solmi  1.  c.  p.  46. 

18  Filippo  Bot&zzi,  1.  c.  p.  193. 


i8 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


to  defend  himself  against  the  accusation  of  ir- 
religiousness : 

“But  such  censurers  might  better  remain  si- 
lent. For  that  action  is  the  manner  of  show- 
ing the  workmaster  so  many  wonderful  things, 
and  this  is  the  way  to  love  so  great  a discoverer. 
For,  verily  great  love  springs  from  great 
knowledge  of  the  beloved  object,  and  if  you 
little  know  it  you  will  be  able  to  love  it  only 
little  or  not  at  all.”  19 

The  value  of  these  utterances  of  Leonardo 
cannot  be  found  in  that  they  impart  to  us  an 
important  psychological  fact,  for  what  they 
maintain  is  obviously  false,  and  Leonardo  must 
have  known  this  as  well  as  we  do.  It  is  not 
true  that  people  refrain  from  loving  or  hat- 
ing until  they  have  studied  and  became  famil- 
iar with  the  nature  of  the  object  to  whom  they 
wish  to  give  these  affects,  on  the  contrary  they 
love  impulsively  and  are  guided  by  emotional 
motives  which  have  nothing  to  do  with  cogni- 
tion and  whose  affects  are  weakened,  if  any- 
thing, by  thought  and  reflection.  Leonardo 

ld  Marie  Herzfeld:  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Traktal  von  der 

Malerei,  Jena,  1909  (Chap.  I,  64). 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


19 


only  could  have  implied  that  the  love  practiced 
by  people  is  not  of  the  proper  and  unobjection- 
able kind,  one  should  so  love  as  to  hold  back 
the  affect  and  to  subject  it  to  mental  elabora- 
tion, and  only  after  it  has  stood  the  test  of  the 
intellect  should  free  play  be  given  to  it.  And 
we  thereby  understand  that  he  wishes  to  tell 
us  that  this  was  the  case  with  himself  and 
that  it  would  be  worth  the  effort  of  everybody 
else  to  treat  love  and  hatred  as  he  himself  does. 

And  it  seems  that  in  his  case  it  was  really 
so.  His  affects  were  controlled  and  subjected 
to  the  investigation  impulse,  he  neither  loved 
nor  hated,  but  questioned  himself  whence  does 
that  arise,  which  he  was  to  love  or  hate,  and 
what  does  it  signify,  and  thus  he  was  at  first 
forced  to  appear  indifferent  to  good  and  evil, 
to  beauty  and  ugliness.  During  this  work  of 
investigation  love  and  hatred  threw'  off  their 
designs  and  uniformly  changed  into  intellectual 
interest.  As  a matter  of  fact  Leonardo  was 
not  dispassionate,  he  did  not  lack  the  divine 
spark  which  is  the  mediate  or  immediate  motive 
power — il  primo  motore — of  all  human  activ- 
ity. He  only  transmuted  his  passion  into  in- 


20 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


quisitiveness,  He  then  applied  himself  to 
study  with  that  persistence,  steadiness,  and 
profundity  which  comes  from  passion,  and  on 
the  height  of  the  psychic  work,  after  the  cog- 
nition was  won,  he  allowed  the  long  checked 
affect  to  break  loose  and  to  flow  off  freely  like 
a branch  of  a stream,  after  it  has  accomplished 
its  work.  At  the  height  of  his  cognition  when 
he  could  examine  a big  part  of  the  whole  he 
was  seized  with  a feeling  of  pathos,  and  in 
ecstatic  words  he  praised  the  grandeur  of  that 
part  of  creation  which  he  studied,  or — in  reli- 
gious cloak— the  greatness  of  the  creator. 
Solmi  has  correctly  divmed  this  process  of 
transformation  in  Leonardo  According  to 
the  quotation  of  such  a passage,  in  which  Leo- 
nardo celebrated  the  higher  impulse  of  nature 
("O  mirabile  necessita  , . /’)  he  said:  “Tale 

trasfigurazlone  della  scienza  della  natura  in 
emozione,  quasi  direi,  relig'iosa,  e uno  del  tratti 
caratteristici  de  manescritti  vinciani,  e si  trova 
cento  e cento  volte  espressa.  . . ” 20 

20  “Such  transfiguration  of  science  and  of  nature  into  emo- 
tions, or  one  might  say,  religion,  ts  one  of  the  characteristic 
traits  of  da  Vinci's  manuscripts,  which  one  finds  expressed 
hundreds  of  times.”  Solmi:  La  resurrezione,  etc.,  p.  II. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


21 


Leonardo  was  called  the  Italian  Faust  on  ac- 
count of  his  insatiable  and  indefatigable  desire 
for  investigation.  But  even  if  we  disregard 
the  fact  that  it  is  the  possible  ^transformation 
of  the  desire  for  investigation  into  the  joys 
of  life  which  is  presupposed  in  the  Faust  trag- 
edy, one  might  venture  to  remark  that  Leon- 
ardo’s system  recalls  Spinoza’s  mode  of  think- 
ing. 

The  transformation  of  psychic  motive  power 
into  the  different  forms  of  activity  is  perhaps 
as  little  convertible  without  loss,  as  in  the 
case  of  physical  powers.  Leonardo's  example 
teaches  how  many  other  things  one  must  follow 
up  in  these  processes.  Not  to  love  before  one 
gains  full  knowledge  of  the  thing  loved  pre- 
supposes a delay  which  is  harmful.  When  one 
finally  reaches  cognition  he  neither  loves  nor 
hates  properly;  one  remains  beyond  love  and 
hatred.  One  has  investigated  instead  of  hav- 
ing loved . It  is  perhaps  for  this  reason  that 
Leonardo’s  life  was  so  much  poorer  in  love  than 
those  of  other  great  men  and  great  artists. 
The  storming  passions  of  the  soul- stirring  and 
consuming  kind,  in  which  others  experience  the 


22  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

best  part  of  their  lives,  seem  to  have  missed 
him. 

There  are  still  other  consequences  when  one 
follows  Leonardo’s  dictum.  Instead  of  acting 
and  producing  one  just  investigates.  He  who 
begins  to  divine  the  grandeur  of  the  universe 
and  its  needs  readily  forgets  his  own  insig- 
nificant self.  When  one  is  struck  with  admi- 
ration and  becomes  truly  humble  he  easily  for- 
gets that  be  himself  is  a part  of  that  living 
force,  and  that  according  to  the  measure  of 
his  own  personality  he  has  the  right  to  make  an 
effort  to  change  that  destined  course  of  the 
world,  the  world  in  which  the  insignificant  is 
no  less  wonderful  and  important  than  the 
great. 

Solmi  thinks  that  Leonardo’s  investigations 
started  with  his  art,21  he  tried  to  investigate 
the  attributes  and  laws  of  light,  of  color,  of 
shades  and  of  perspective  so  as  to  be  sure  of 
becoming  a master  in  the  imitation  of  nature 
and  to  be  able  to  show  the  way  to  others.  It 

21  La  resurrezione,  etc.,  pv  8 : '‘Leonardo  placed  the  study  of 
nature  as  a precept  to  painting  . . . later  the  passion  for  study 
became  dominating,  he  no  longer  wished  to  acquire  science  for 
art,  but  science  for  science’  sake.” 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


23 


is  probable  that  already  at  that  time  he  over- 
estimated the  value  of  this  knowledge  for  the 
artist.  Following  the  guide-rope  of  the  paint- 
er's need,  he  was  then  driven  further  and  fur- 
ther to  investigate  the  objects  of  the  art  of 
painting,  such  as  animals  and  plants,  and  the 
proportions  of  the  human  body,  and  to  follow 
the  path  from  their  exterior  to  their  interior 
structure  and  biological  functions,  which  really 
also  express  themselves  in  their  appearance 
and  should  be  depicted  in  art.  And  finally  he 
was  pulled  along  by  this  overwhelming  desire 
until  the  connection  was  torn  from  the  de- 
mands of  his  art,  so  that  he  discovered  the  gen- 
eral laws  of  mechanics  and  divined  the  history 
of  the  stratification  and  fossilization  of  the 
Arno-valley,  until  he  could  enter  in  his  book 
with  capital  letters  the  cognition : II  sole  non 

si  move  (The  sun  does  not  move).  His  inves- 
tigations were  thus  extended  over  almost  all 
realms  of  natural  science,  in  every  one  of  which 
he  was  a discoverer  or  at  least  a prophet  or 
forerunner.22  However,  his  curiosity  contin- 
ued to  be  directed  to  the  outer  world,  some- 

22  For  an  enumeration  of  his  scientific  attainments  see  Marie 


24 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


thing  kept  him  away  from  the  investigation  of 
the  psychic  life  of  men;  there  was  little  room 
for  psychology  ill  the  Academia  Viticiana,” 
for  which  he  drew  very  artistic  and  very  com- 
plicated emblems. 

When  he  later  made  the  effort  to  return  from 
his  investigations  to  the  art  from  which  he 
started  he  felt  that  he  was  disturbed  by  the 
new  paths  of  his  interest  and  by  the  changed 
nature  of  his  psychic  work.  In  the  picture  he 
was  interested  above  all  in  a problem,  and  be- 
hind this  one  he  saw  emerging  numerous  other 
problems  just  as  he  was  accustomed  in  the  end- 
less and  indeterminable  investigations  of  nat- 
ural history.  He  was  no  longer  able  to  limit 
his  demands,  to  isolate  the  work  of  art*  and 
to  tear  it  out  from  that  great  connection  of 
which  he  knew  it  formed  part.  After  the  most 
exhausting  efforts  to  bring  to  expression  all 
that  was  in  him,  all  that  was  connected  with  it 
in  his  thoughts,  he  was  forced  to  leave  it  un- 
finished, or  to  declare  it  incomplete. 

The  artist  had  once  taken  into  his  service 


Herzfeld's  interesting  introduction  (Jena,  1906)  to  the  essays 
of  the  Conferenze  Florentine,  1910,  and  elsewhere. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  25 

the  investigator  to  assist  him,  now  the  servant 
was  stronger  and  suppressed  his  master. 

When  we  find  in  the  portrait  of  a person  one 
single  impulse  very  forcibly  developed,  as  curi- 
osity in  the  case  of  Leonardo,  we  look  for  the 
explanation  in  a special  constitution,  concern- 
ing its  probable  organic  determination  nardly 
anything  is  known.  Our  psychoanalytic  stud- 
ies of  nervous  people  lead  us  to  look  for  two 
other  expectations  which  we  would  like  to  find 
verified  in  every  case.  We  consider  it  prob- 
able that  this  very  forcible  impulse  was  already 
active  in  the  earliest  childhood  of  the  person, 
and  that  its  supreme  sway  was  fixed  by  infan- 
tile impressions;  and  we  further  assume  that 
originally  it  drew  upon  sexual  motive  powers 
for  its  reenforcement  so  that  it  later  can  take 
the  place  of  a part  of  the  sexual  life.  Such 
person  would  then,  e.g.,  investigate  with  that 
passionate  devotion  which  another  would  give 
to  his  love,  and  he  could  investigate  instead  of 
loving.  We  would  venture  the  conclusion  of 
a sexual  reenforcement  not  only  in  the  impulse 
to  investigate,  but  also  in  most  other  cases  of 
special  intensity  of  an  impulse. 


26 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


Observation  of  daily  life  shows  ns  that  most 
persons  have  the  capacity  to  direct  a very  tan- 
gible part  of  their  sexual  motive  powers  to 
their  professional  or  business  activities.  The 
sexual  impulse  is  particularly  suited  to  yield 
such  contributions  because  it  is  endowed  with 
the  capacity  of  sublimation,  i.e.,  it  has  the 
powrer  to  exchange  its  nearest  aim  for  others 
of  higher  value  which  are  not  sexuaL  We 
consider  this  process  as  proved,  if  the  history 
of  childhood  or  the  psychic  developmental  his- 
tory of  a person  shows  that  in  childhood  this 
powerful  impulse  was  in  the  service  of  the  sex- 
ual interest.  We  consider  it  a further  cor- 
roboration if  this  is  substantiated  by  a strik- 
ing stunting  in  the  sexual  life  of  mature  years, 
as  if  a part  of  the  sexual  activity  had  now  been 
replaced  by  the  activity  of  the  predominant  im- 
pulse. 

The  application  of  these  assumptions  to  the 
case  of  the  predominant  investigation-impulse 
seems  to  be  subject  to  special  difficulties,  as  one 
is  unwilling  to  admit  that  this  serious  impulse 
exists  in  children  or  that  children  show  any 
noteworthy  sexual  interest.  However,  these 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


27 


difficulties  are  easily  obviated.  The  untiring 
pleasure  in  questioning  as  seen  in  little  children 
demonstrates  their  curiosity,  which  is  puzzling 
to  the  grown-up,  as  long  as  he  does  not  under- 
stand that  all  these  questions  are  only  circum- 
locutions, and  that  they  cannot  come  to  an  end 
because  they  replace  only  one  question  which 
the  child  does  not  put.  When  the  child  be- 
comes older  and  gains  more  understanding  this 
manifestation  of  curiosity  suddenly  disappears. 
But  psychoanalytic  investigation  gives  us  a full 
explanation  in  that  it  teaches  us  that  many, 
perhaps  most  children,  at  least  the  most  gifted 
ones,  go  through  a period  beginning  with  the 
third  year,  which  may  be  designated  as  the 
period  of  infantile  sexual  investigation . As 
far  as  we  know,  the  curiosity  is  not  awakened 
spontaneously  in  children  of  this  age,  but  is 
aroused  through  the  impression  of  an  impor- 
tant experience,  through  the  birth  of  a little 
brother  or  sister,  or  through  fear  of  the  same 
endangered  by  some  outward  experience, 
wherein  the  child  sees  a danger  to  his  egotistic 
interests.  The  investigation  directs  itself  to 
the  question  whence  children  come,  as  if  the 


28 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


child  were  looking  for  means  to  guard  against 
such  undesired  event.  We  were  astonished  to 
find  that  the  child  refuses  to  give  credence  to  the 
information  imparted  to  it,  e.g.,  it  energetically 
rejects  the  mythological  and  so  ingenious  stork- 
fable,  we  were  astonished  to  find  that  its 
psychic  independence  dates  from  this  act  of  dis- 
belief, that  it  often  feels  itself  at  serious  vari- 
ance with  the  grown-ups,  and  never  forgives 
them  for  having  been  deceived  of  the  truth  on 
this  occasion,  It  investigates  in  its  own  way. 
it  divines  that  the  child  is  in  the  mother's 
womb,  and  guided  by  the  feelings  of  its  own 
sexuality,  it  formulates  for  itself  theories  about 
the  origin  of  children  from  food,  about  being 
born  through  the  bowels,  about  the  role  of  the 
father  which  is  difficult  to  fathom,  and  even 
at  that  time  it  has  a vague  conception  of  the 
sexual  act  which  appears  to  the  child  as  some- 
thing hostile,  as  something  violent.  But  as  its 
own  sexual  constitution  is  not  yet  equal  to  the 
task  of  producing  children,  his  investigation 
whence  come  children  must  also  run  aground 
and  must  be  left  in  the  lurch  as  unfinished. 
The  impression  of  this  failure  at  the  first  at- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


29 


tempt  of  intellectual  independence  seems  to  be 
of  a persevering  and  profoundly  depressing 
nature.23 

If  the  period  of  infantile  sexual  investigation 
comes  to  an  end  through  an  impetus  of  ener- 
getic sexual  repression,  the  early  association 
with  sexual  interest  may  result  in  three  differ- 
ent possibilities  for  the  future  fate  of  the  in- 
vestigation impulse.  The  investigation  either 
shares  the  fate  of  the  sexuality,  the  curiosity 
henceforth  remains  inhibited  and  the  free  ac- 
tivity of  intelligence  may  become  narrowed  for 
life ; this  is  especially  made  possible  by  the  pow- 
erful religious  inhibition  of  thought,  which  is 
brought  about  shortly  hereafter  through  educa- 
tion. This  is  the  type  of  neurotic  inhibition. 
We  know  well  that  the  so  acquired  mental 
weakness  furnishes  effective  support  for  the 

23  For  a corroboration  of  this  improbable  sounding  assertion 
see  the  “Analysis  of  the  Phobia  of  a Five-year-old  Boy,” 
Jahrbuch  fur  Psychoanalytische  und  Fsychopatliologischc 
Forselmngen,  Bd.  I,  1909,  and  the  similar  observation  in  Bd.  II, 
1910.  In  an  essay  concerning  “Infantile  Theories  of  Sex” 
(Samtnlungen  kleiner  Schriften  zur  Neurosen!  eh  re,  p.  167, 
Second  Series,  1909),  I wrote:  “But  this  reasoning  and  doubt- 
ing serves  as  a model  for  all  later  intellectual  work  in  prob- 
lems, and  the  first  failure  acts  as  a paralyze r for  all  times.” 


30 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


outbreak  of  a neurotic  disease.  In  a second 
type  the  intellectual  development  is  sufficiently 
strong  to  withstand  the  sexual  repression  pull- 
ing at  it.  Sometimes  after  the  disappearance 
of  the  infantile  sexual  investigation,  it  offers 
its  support  to  the  old  association  in  order  to 
elude  the  sexual  repression,  and  the  suppressed 
sexual  investigation  comes  back  from  the  un- 
conscious as  compulsive  reasoning,  it  is  nat- 
urally distorted  and  not  free,  but  forceful 
enough  to  sexualize  even  thought  itself  and  to 
accentuate  the  intellectual  operations  with  the 
pleasure  and  fear  of  the  actual  sexual  proc- 
esses. Here  the  investigation  becomes  sexual 
activity  and  often  exclusively  so,  the  feeling  of 
settling  the  problem  and  of  explaining  things 
in  the  mind  is  put  in  place  of  sexual  gratifica- 
tion. Rut  the  indeterminate  character  of  the 
infantile  investigation  repeats  itself  also  in  the 
fact  that  this  reasoning  never  ends,  and  that 
the  desired  intellectual  feeling  of  the  solution 
constantly  recedes  into  the  distance.  By  vir- 
tue of  a special  disposition  the  third,  which  is 
the  most  rare  and  most  perfect  type,  escapes 
the  inhibition  of  thought  and  the  compulsive 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  31 

reasoning.  Also  here  sexual  repression  takes 
place,  it  is  unable,  however,  to  direct  a partial 
impulse  of  the  sexual  pleasure  into  the  uncon- 
scious, but  the  libido  withdraws  from  the  fate 
of  the  repression  by  being  sublimated  from  the 
beginning  into  curiosity,  and  by  reenforcing 
the  powerful  investigation  impulse.  Here, 
too,  the  investigation  becomes  more  or  less 
compulsive  and  a substitute  of  the  sexual  ac- 
tivity, but  owing  to  the  absolute  difference  of 
the  psychic  process  behind  it  (sublimation  in 
place  of  the  emergence  from  the  unconscious) 
the  character  of  the  neurosis  does  not  manifest 
itself,  the  subjection  to  the  original  complexes 
of  the  infantile  sexual  investigation  disappears, 
and  the  impulse  can  freely  put  itself  in  the 
service  of  the  intellectual  interest.  It  takes 
account  of  the  sexual  repression  which  made  it 
so  strong  in  contributing  to  it  sublimated 
libido,  by  avoiding  all  occupation  with  sexual 
themes. 

In  mentioning  the  concurrence  in  Leonardo 
of  the  powerful  investigation  impulse  with  the 
stunting  of  his  sexual  life  which  was  limited  to 
the  so-called  ideal  homosexuality,  we  feel  in- 


32 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


dined  to  consider  him  as  a model  example  of 
our  third  type.  The  most  essential  point  of 
his  character  and  the  secret  of  it  seems  to  lie 
in  the  fact,  that  after  utilizing  the  infantile  ac- 
tivity of  curiosity  in  the  service  of  exual  in- 
terest he  was  able  to  sublimate  the  greater  part 
of  his  libido  into  the  impulse  of  investigation. 
But  to  be  sure  the  proof  of  this  conception  is 
not  easy  to  produce.  To  do  this  we  would  have 
to  have  an  insight  into  the  psychic  development 
of  his  first  childhood  years,  and  it  seems  fool- 
ish to  hope  for  such  material  when  the  reports 
concerning  his  life  are  so  meager  and  so  un- 
certain ; and  moreover,  when  we  deal  with  in- 
formation which  even  persons  of  our  own  gen- 
eration withdraw  from  the  attention  of  the 
observer. 

We  know  very  little  concerning  Leonardo’s 
youth.  He  was  born  in  1452  in  the  little  city 
of  Vinci  between  Florence  and  Empoli ; he  was 
an  illegitimate  child  which  was  surely  not  con- 
sidered a great  popular  stain  in  that  time.  His 
father  was  Ser  Piero  da  Vinci,  a notary  and 
descendant  of  notaries  and  farmers,  who  took 
their  name  from  the  place  Vinci;  his  mother, 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  33 

a certain  Caterina,  probably  a peasant  girl,  who 
later  married  another  native  of  Vinci.  Noth- 
ing else  about  his  mother  appears  in  the  life  his- 
tory of  Leonardo,  only  the  writer  Merejkowski 
believed  to  have  found  some  traces  of  her. 
The  only  definite  information  about  Leonar- 
do's childhood  is  furnished  by  a legal  document 
from  the  year  1457,  a register  of  assessment  in 
which  Vinci  Leonardo  is  mentioned  among  the 
members  of  the  family  as  a five-year-old  ille- 
gitimate child  of  Ser  Piero.24  As  the  mar- 
riage of  Ser  Piero  with  Donna  Albiera  re- 
mained childless  the  little  Leonardo  could  be 
brought  up  in  his  father's  house.  He  did  not 
leave  this  house  until  he  entered  as  apprentice 

—it  is  not  known  what  vear — -in  the  studio  of 

* 

Andrea  del  Verrocchio.  In  1472  Leonardo's 
name  could  already  be  found  in  the  register  of 
the  members  of  the  uCompagnia  dei  Pittori." 
That  is  all. 


24  Scognamiglio  1.  c.,  p.  15. 


II 

As  far  as  I know  Leonardo  only  once  in- 
terspersed in  his  scientific  descriptions  a com- 
munication from  his  childhood.  In  a passage 
where  he  speaks  about  the  flight  of  the  vulture, 
he  suddenly  interrupts  himself  in  order  to  fol- 
low up  a memory  from  very  early  years  which 
came  to  his  mind. 

“It  seems  that  it  had  been  destined  before 
that  I should  occupy  myself  so  thoroughly  with 
the  vulture , for  it  comes  to  my  mind  as  a very 
early  memory , when  I was  still  in  the  cradle , 
a vulture  came  down  to  me , he  opened  my 
mouth  with  his  tail  and  struck  me  a fezv  times 
with  his  tail  against  my  lips  ” 1 

We  have  here  an  infantile  memory  and  to 
be  sure  of  the  strangest  sort.  It  is  strange  on 
account  of  its  content  and  account  of  the  time 
of  life  in  which  it  was  fixed.  That  a person 

1 Cited  by  Scognamiglio  from  the  Codex  Atlanticus,  p.  65. 

34 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


35 


could  retain  a memory  of  the  nursing  period  is 
perhaps  not  impossible,  but  it  can  in  no  way 
be  taken  as  certain.  But  what  this  memory  of 
Leonardo  states,  namely,  that  a vulture  opened 
the  child’s  mouth  with  its  tail,  sounds  so  im- 
probable, so  fabulous,  that  another  conception 
which  puts  an  end  to  the  two  difficulties  with 
one  stroke  appeals  much  more  to  our  judgment 
The  scene  of  the  vulture  is  not  a memory  of 
Leonardo,  but  a phantasy  which  he  formed 
later,  and  transferred  into  his  childhood.  The 
childhood  memories  of  persons  often  have  no 
different  origin,  as  a matter  of  fact,  they  are 
not  fixated  from  an  experience  like  the  con- 
scious memories  from  the  time  of  maturity  and 
then  repeated,  but  they  are  not  produced  until 
a later  period  when  childhood  is  already  past, 
they  are  then  changed  and  disguised  and  put  in 
the  service  of  later  tendencies,  so  that  in  gen- 
eral they  cannot  be  strictly  differentiated  from 
phantasies.  Their  nature  will  perhaps  be  best 
understood  by  recalling  the  manner  in  which 
history  writing  originated  among  ancient  na- 
tions. As  long  as  the  nation  was  small  and 
weak  it  gave  no  thought  to  the  writing  of  its 


36  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

history,  it  tilled  the  soil  of  its  land,  defended 
its  existence  against  its  neighbors  by  seeking 
to  wrest  land  from  them  and  endeavored  to 
become  rich.  It  was  a heroic  but  unhistoric 
time.  Then  came  another  age,  a period  of 
self-realization  in  which  one  felt  rich  and  pow- 
erful, and  it  was  then  that  one  experienced 
the  need  to  discover  whence  one  originated 
and  how  one  developed.  The  history-writing 
which  then  continues  to  register  the  present 
events  throws  also  its  backward  glance  to  the 
past,  it  gathers  traditions  and  legends,  it  in- 
terprets what  survived  from  olden  times  into 
customs  and  uses,  and  thus  creates  a history 
of  past  ages.  It  is  quite  natural  that  this  his- 
tory of  the  past  ages  is  more  the  expressions 
of  opinions  and  desires  of  the  present  than  a 
faithful  picture  of  the  past,  for  many  a thing 
escaped  the  people's  memory,  other  things  be- 
came distorted,  some  trace  of  the  past  was  mis- 
understood and  interpreted  in  the  sense  of  the 
present  ; and  besides  one  does  not  write  history 
through  motives  of  objective  curiosity,  but  be- 
cause one  desires  to  impress  his  contempor- 
aries, to  stimulate  and  extol  them,  or  to  hold  the 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


37 


mirror  before  them.  The  conscious  memory 
of  a person  concerning  the  experiences  of  his 
maturity  may  now  be  fully  compared  to  that  of 
history  writing,  and  his  infantile  memories,  as 
far  as  their  origin  and  reliability  are  concerned 
will  actually  correspond  to  the  history  of  the 
primitive  period  of  a people  which  was  com- 
piled later  with  purposive  intent. 

Now  one  may  think  that  if  Leonardo’s  story 
of  the  vulture  which  visited  him  in  his  cradle 
is  only  a phantasy  of  later  birth,  it  is  hardly 
worth  while  giving  more  time  to  it.  One 
could  easily  explain  it  by  his  openly  avowed 
inclination  to  occupy  himself  with  the  problem 
of  the  flight  of  the  bird  which  would  lend  to 
this  phantasy  an  air  of  predetermined  fate. 
But  with  this  depreciation  one  commits  as  great 
an  injustice  as  if  one  would  simply  ignore  the 
material  of  legends,  traditions,  and  interpreta- 
tions in  the  primitive  history  of  a people.  Not- 
withstanding all  distortions  and  misunder- 
standings to  the  contrary  they  still  represent 
the  reality  of  the  past ; they  represent  what  the 
people  formed  out  of  the  experiences  of  its  past 
age  under  the  domination  of  once  powerful  and 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


38 

to-day  still  effective  motives,  and  if  these  dis- 
tortions could  be  unraveled  through  the  knowl- 
edge of  all  effective  forces,  one  would  surely 
discover  the  historic  truth  under  this  legendary 
material.  The  same  holds  true  for  the  infan- 
tile reminiscences  or  for  the  phantasies  of  indi- 
viduals. What  a person  thinks  he  recalls  from 
his  childhood,  is  not  of  an  indifferent  nature. 
As  a rule  the  memory  remnants,  which  he  him- 
self does  not  understand,  conceal  invaluable 
evidences  of  the  most  important  features  of  his 
psychic  development.  As  the  psychoanalytic 
technique  affords  us  excellent  means  for  bring- 
ing to  light  this  concealed  material,  we  shall 
venture  the  attempt  to  fill  the  gaps  in  the  his- 
tory of  Leonardo's  life  through  the  analysis  of 
his  infantile  phantasy.  And  if  we  should  not 
attain  a satisfactory  degree  of  certainty,  we 
will  have  to  console  ourselves  with  the  fact  that 
so  many  other  investigations  about  this  great 
and  mysterious  man  have  met  no  better  fate. 

When  we  examine  Leonardo's  vulture-phan- 
tasy with  the  eyes  of  a psychoanalyst  then  it 
does  not  seem  strange  very  long;  we  recall  that 
we  have  often  found  similar  structures  in 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


39 


dreams,  so  that  we  may  venture  to  translate 
this  phantasy  from  its  strange  language  into 
words  that  are  universally  understood.  The 
translation  then  follows  an  erotic  direction. 
Tail,  “coda,”  is  one  of  the  most  familiar  sym- 
bols, as  well  as  a substitutive  designation  of  the 
male  member  which  is  no  less  true  in  Italian 
than  in  other  languages.  The  situation  con- 
tained in  the  phantasy,  that  a vulture  opened 
the  mouth  of  the  child  and  forcefully  belabored 
it  with  its  tail,  corresponds  to  the  idea  of  fella- 
tio, a sexual  act  in  which  the  member  is  placed 
into  the  mouth  of  the  other  person.  Strangely 
enough  this  phantasy  is  altogether  of  a passive 
character;  it  resembles  certain  dreams  and 
phantasies  of  women  and  of  passive  homosex- 
uals who  play  the  feminine  part  in  sexual  re- 
lations. 

Let  the  reader  be  patient  for  a while  and  not 
flare  up  with  indignation  and  refuse  to  follow 
psychoanalysis  because  in  its  very  first  applica- 
tions it  leads  to  an  unpardonable  slander  of  the 
memory  of  a great  and  pure  man.  For  it  is 
quite  certain  that  this  indignation  will  never 
solve  for  us  the  meaning  of  Leonardo’s  child- 


40 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


hood  phantasy;  on  the  other  hand,  Leonardo 
has  unequivocally  acknowledged  this  phantasy, 
and  we  shall  therefore  not  relinquish  the  ex- 
pectation—or  if  you  prefer  the  preconception— 
that  like  every  psychic  production  such  as 
dreams,  visions  and  deliria  this  phantasy,  too, 
must  have  some  meaning.  Let  us  therefore 
lend  our  unprejudiced  ears  for  a while  to  psy- 
choanalytic work  which  after  all  has  not  yet 
uttered  the  last  word. 

The  desire  to  take  the  male  member  into  the 
mouth  and  suck  it,  which  is  considered  as  one 
of  the  most  disgusting  of  sexual  perversions, 
is  nevertheless  a frequent  occurrence  among 
the  women  of  our  time — and  as  shown  in  old 
sculptures  was  the  same  in  earlier  times — and 
in  the  state  of  being  in  love  seems  to  lose  en- 
tirely its  disgusting  character.  The  physician 
encounters  phantasies  based  on  this  desire, 
even  in  women  who  did  not  come  to  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  possibility  of  such  sexual  gratifica- 
tion by  reading  v.  Krafft-Ebing’s  Psycho- 
pathia  Sexualis  or  through  other  information. 
It  seems  that  it  is  quite  easy  for  the  women 
themselves  to  produce  such  wish-phanta- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


41 


sies.2  Investigation  then  teaches  us  that  this 
situation,  so  forcibly  condemned  by  custom, 
may  be  traced  to  the  most  harmless  origin.  It 
is  nothing  but  the  elaboration  of  another  situa- 
tion in  which  we  all  once  felt  comfort,  namely, 
when  we  were  in  the  suckling-age  (’'when  I was 
still  in  the  cradle”)  and  took  the  nipple  of  our 
mother’s  or  wet-nurse’s  breast  into  our  mouth 
to  suck  it.  The  organic  impression  of  this  first 
pleasure  in  our  lives  surely  remains  indelibly 
impregnated;  when  the  child  later  learns  to 
know  the  udder  of  the  cow,  which  in  function 
is  a breast-nipple,  but  in  shape  and  in  position 
on  the  abdomen  resembles  the  penis,  it  obtains 
the  primary  basis  for  the  later  formation  of 
that  disgusting  sexual  phantasy. 

We  now  understand  why  Leonardo  displaced 
the  memory  of  the  supposed  experience  with 
the  vulture  to  his  nursing  period.  This  phan- 
tasy conceals  nothing  more  or  less  than  a rem- 
iniscence of  nursing — or  being  nursed — at  the 
mother’s  breast,  a scene  both  human  and  beau- 
tiful, which  he  as  well  as  other  artists  under- 

2 Cf.  here  the  “Bruchstiklc  einer  Hysteneanalyse/’  in  Neu- 
rosenlehre,  Second  series,  1909. 


42 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


took  to  depict  with  the  brush  in  the  form  of  the 
mother  of  God  and  her  child.  At  all  events, 
we  also  wish  to  maintain,  something  we  do  not 
as  yet  understand,  that  this  reminiscence, 
equally  significant  for  both  sexes,  was  elabo- 
rated in  the  man  Leonardo  into  a passive  homo- 
sexual phantasy.  For  the  present  we  shall  not 
take  up  the  question  as  to  what  connection 
there  is  between  homosexuality  and  suckling 
at  the  mother’s  breast,  we  merely  wish  to  recall 
that  tradition  actually  designates  Leonardo  as 
a person  of  homosexual  feelings.  In  consider- 
ing this,  it  makes  no  difference  whether  that  ac- 
cusation against  the  youth  Leonardo  was  justi- 
fied or  not.  It  is  not  the  real  activity  but  the 
nature  of  the  feeling  which  causes  us  to  decide 
whether  to  attribute  to  some  one  the  character- 
istic of  homosexuality. 

Another  incomprehensible  feature  of  Leo- 
nardo’s infantile  phantasy  next  claims  our  in- 
terest. We  interpret  the  phantasy  of  being 
wet-nursed  by  the  mother  and  find  that  the 
mother  is  replaced  by  a vulture.  Where  does 
this  vulture  originate  and  how  does  he  come 
into  this  place? 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


43 


A thought  now  obtrudes  itself  which  seems 
so  remote  that  one  is  tempted  to  ignore  it.  In 
the  sacred  hieroglyphics  of  the  old  Egyptians 
the  mother  is  represented  by  the  picture  of  the 
vulture.3  These  Egyptians  also  worshiped  a 
motherly  deity,  whose  head  was  vulture  like,  or 
who  had  many  heads  of  which  at  least  one  or 
two  wras  that  of  a vulture.4  The  name  of  this 
goddess  was  pronounced  Mut ; we  may  question 
whether  the  sound  similarity  to  our  word 
mother  (Mutter)  is  only  accidental?  So  the 
vulture  really  has  some  connection  with  the 
mother,  but  of  w^hat  help  is  that  to  us?  Have 
we  a right  to  attribute  this  knowledge  to  Leo- 
nardo wdien  Francois  Champollion  first  suc- 
ceeded in  reading  hieroglyphics  between  1790- 
1832? 5 

It  wrould  also  be  interesting  to  discover  in 
what  wray  the  old  Egyptians  came  to  choose  the 
vulture  as  a symbol  of  motherhood.  As  a mat- 
ter of  fact  the  religion  and  culture  of  Egyptians 

3Horapollo:  Hieroglyphica  I,  n.  M ifrcpa  te  ypd^oyrej; 

. . . yvira  £aypa<povcru>. 

4 Roscher : Ausf . Lexicon  der  griechischen  und  romischen 
Mythologie.  Artikel  Mut,  II  Bd.,  1894-1897. — Lanzone. 
Dizionario  di  Mitologia  egizia.  Torino,  1882. 

5 H.  Hartlebcn,  Champollion.  Sein  Lebcn  und  sein  Werk,  1906. 


44 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


were  subjects  of  scientific  interest  even  to  the 
Greeks  and  Romans,  and  long  before  we  our- 
selves were  able  to  read  the  Egyptian  monu- 
ments we  had  at  our  disposal  some  communica- 
tions about  them  from  preserved  works  of  clas- 
sical antiquity.  Some  of  these  writings  be- 
longed to  familiar  authors  like  Strabo,  Plu- 
tarch, Aminianus  Marcellas,  and  some  bear  un- 
familiar names  and  are  uncertain  as  to  origin 
and  time,  like  the  hieroglyphica  of  Horapoilo 
Nilus,  and  like  the  traditional  book  of  oriental 
priestly  wisdom  bearing  the  godly  name 
Hermes  Trismegistos.  From  these  sources 
we  Searn  that  the  vulture  was  a symbol  of 
motherhood  because  it  was  thought  that  this 
species  of  birds  had  only  female  vultures  and 
no  males.6  The  natural  history  of  the  ancients 
shows  a counterpart  to  this  limitation  among 
the  scarebaeus  beetles  which  were  revered  by 
the  Egyptians  as  godly,  no  females  were  sup- 
posed to  exist.7 

e “yvira  5e  lipptva  ov  (p&ciyhccOai  ir ore,  otXd  BvfXelas  awatras” 
cited  by  v.  Romer.  Uber  die  androgynische  Idee  des  Lebens, 
Jalirb.  f.  Sexuelle  Zwischenstufen,  V,  1903,  P-  732. 

7 Plutarch : Veluti  scarabaeos  mares  tantum  esse  putarunt 
Aegypti*  sic  inter  vultures  mares  non  inveniri  statuerunt. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


45 


But  how  does  impregnation  take  place  in  vul- 
tures if  only  females  exist?  This  is  fully  an- 
swered in  a passage  of  Horapollo  * At  a cer- 
tain time  these  birds  stop  in  the  midst  of  their 
flight,  open  their  vagina  and  are  impregnated 
by  the  wind. 

Unexpectedly  we  have  now  reached  a point 
where  we  can  take  something  as  quite  probable 
which  only  shortly  before  we  had  to  reject  as 
absurd.  It  is  quite  possible  that  Leonardo  was 
well  acquainted  with  the  scientific  fable,  ac- 
cording to  which  the  Egyptians  represented  the 
idea  of  mother  with  the  picture  of  the  vulture. 
He  was  an  omnivorous  reader  whose  interest 
comprised  all  spheres  of  literature  and  knowl- 
edge. In  the  Codex  Atlanticus  we  find  an  in- 
dex of  all  books  which  he  possessed  at  a cer- 
tain time,9  as  well  as  numerous  notices  about 
other  books  which  he  borrowed  from  friends, 
and  according  to  the  excerpts  which  Fr„  Rich- 
ter 30  compiled  from  his  drawings  we  can 

8Horapollinis  Niloi  Hieroglyphica  edidit  Conradus  Leemans 
Amstelodami,  1835.  The  words  referring  to  the  sex  of  the 
vulture  read  as  follows  ( p.  14)  : “Mrepa  &rrei8^  hpptv 
iv  rovTip  yivet  ru> v iiatov  o\)\  v-no^px^i'* 

9 E.  Muntz,  i.  c.,  p.  282.  10  E.  Muntz,  1.  e. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


46 

hardly  overestimate  the  extent  of  his  reading. 
Among  these  books  there  was  no  lack  of  older 
as  well  as  contemporary  works  treating  of  nat 
ural  history.  All  these  books  were  already  in 
print  at  that  time,  and  it  so  happens  that  Milan 
was  the  principal  place  of  the  young  art  of  book 
printing  in  Italy. 

When  we  proceed  further  we  come  upon  a 
communication  which  may  raise  to  a certainty 
the  probability  that  Leonardo  knew  the  vulture 
fable.  The  erudite  editor  and  commentator  of 
Horapollo  remarked  in  connection  with  the  text 
(p.  i/2)  cited  before:  Caeterum  hanc  fabulam 
dc  vulturibns  cupid e ample xi  sunt  Patres  Ec- 
clesiastic}, ut  ita  argumento  ex  rerum  natura 
petito  refutarent  eos , qui  Virginis  partum  nega- 
bant ; itaque  apud  omnes  fere  hujus  ret  mentio 
occur  it. 

Hence  the  fable  of  the  monosexuality  and 
the  conception  of  the  vulture  by  no  means  re- 
mained as  an  indifferent  anecdote  as  in  the  case 
of  the  analogous  fable  of  the  scareteeus  beetles; 
that  church  fathers  mastered  it  in  order  to  have 
it  ready  as  an  argument  from  natural  history 
against  those  who  doubted  the  sacred  history. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


47 


If  according  the  best  information  from  antiq- 
uity the  vultures  were  directed  to  let  them- 
selves be  impregnated  by  the  wind,  why  should 
the  same  thing  not  have  happened  even  once  in 
a human  female?  On  account  of  this  use  the 
church  fathers  were  “almost  all”  in  the  habit 
of  relating  this  vulture  fable,  and  now  it  can 
hardly  remain  doubtful  that  it  also  became 
known  to  Leonardo  through  so  powerful  a 
source. 

The  origin  of  Leonardo’s  vulture  phantasy 
can  be  conceived  in  the  following  manner: 
While  reading  in  the  writings  of  a church 
father  or  in  a book  on  natural  science  that  the 
vultures  are  all  females  and  that  they  know  to 
procreate  without  the  cooperation  of  a male,  a 
memory  emerged  in  him  which  became  trans- 
formed into  that  phantasy,  but  which  meant  to 
say  that  he  also  had  been  such  a vulture  child, 
which  had  a mother  but  no  father.  An  echo 
of  pleasure  which  he  experienced  at  his  moth- 
er’s breast  was  added  to  this  in  the  manner  as 
so  old  impressions  alone  can  manifest  them- 
selves. The  allusion  to  the  idea  of  the  holy 
virgin  with  the  child,  formed  by  the  authors, 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


48 

which  is  so  dear  to  every  artist,  must  have  con- 
tributed to  it  to  make  this  phantasy  seem  to  him 
valuable  and  important.  For  this  helped  him 
to  identify  himself  with  the  Christ  child,  the 
comforter  and  savior  of  not  alone  this  one 
woman. 

When  we  break  up  an  infantile  phantasy  we 
strive  to  separate  the  real  memory  content 
from  the  later  motives  which  modify  and  dis- 
tort the  same.  In  the  case  of  Leonardo  we 
now  think  that  we  know  the  real  content  of  the 
phantasy.  The  replacement  of  the  mother  by 
the  vulture  indicates  that  the  child  missed  the 
father  and  felt  himself  alone  with  his  mother. 
The  fact  of  Leonardo’s  illegitimate  birth  fits  in 
with  his  vulture  phantasy ; only  on  account  of  it 
was  he  able  to  compare  himself  with  a vulture 
child.  But  we  have  discovered  as  the  next 
definite  fact  from  his  youth  that  at  the  age  of 
five  years  he  had  already  been  received  in  his 
father’s  home;  when  this  took  place,  whether  a 
few  months  following  his  birth,  or  a few  weeks 
before  the  taking  of  the  assessment  of  taxes,  is 
entirely  unknown  to  us.  The  interpretation  of 
the  vulture  phantasy  then  steps  in  and  wants 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


49 


to  tell  us  that  Leonardo  did  not  spend  the  first 
decisive  years  of  his  life  with  his  father  and  his 
step-mother  but  with  his  poor,  forsaken,  real 
mother,  so  that  he  had  time  to  miss  his  father. 
This  still  seems  to  be  a rather  meager  and 
rather  daring  result  of  the  psychoanalytic  ef- 
fort, but  on  further  reflection  it  will  gain  in 
significance.  Certainty  will  be  promoted  by 
mentioning  the  actual  relations  in  Leonardo’s 
childhood.  According  to  the  reports,  his  fa- 
ther Ser  Piero  da  Vinci  married  the  prominent 
Donna  Albiera  during  the  year  of  Leonardo’s 
birth;  it  was  to  the  childlessness  of  this  mar- 
riage that  the  boy  owed  his  legalized  reception 
into  his  father’s  or  rather  grandfather’s  house 
during  his  fifth  year.  However,  it  is  not  cus- 
tomary to  offer  an  illegitimate  offspring  to  a 
young  woman’s  care  at  the  beginning  of  mar- 
riage when  she  is  still  expecting  to  be  blessed 
with  children.  Years  of  disappointment  must 
have  elapsed  before  it  was  decided  to  adopt  the 
probably  handsomely  developed  illegitimate 
child  as  a compensation  for  legitimate  children 
who  were  vainly  hoped  for.  It  harmonizes 
best  with  the  interpretation  of  the  vulture- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


50 

phantasy,  if  at  least  three  years  or  perhaps  five 
years  of  Leonardo’s  life  had  elapsed  before  he 
changed  from  his  lonely  mother  to  his  father's 
home.  But  then  it  had  already  become  too 
late.  In  the  first  three  or  four  years  of  life  im- 
pressions are  fixed  and  modes  of  reactions  are 
formed  towards  the  outer  world  which  can 
never  be  robbed  of  their  importance  by  any 
later  experiences. 

If  it  is  true  that  the  incomprehensible  child- 
hood reminiscences  and  the  person’s  phantasies 
based  on  them  always  bring  out  the  most  sig- 
nificant of  his  psychic  development,  then  the 
fact  corroborated  by  the  vulture  phantasy,  that 
Leonardo  passed  the  first  years  of  his  life  alone 
with  his  mother  must  have  been  a most  de- 
cisive influence  on  the  formation  of  his  inner 
fife.  Under  the  effect  of  this  constellation  it 
could  not  have  been  otherwise  than  that  the 
child  which  in  his  young  life  encountered  one 
problem  more  than  other  children,  should  have 
begun  to  ponder  very  passionately  over  this 
riddle  and  thus  should  have  become  an  investi- 
gator early  in  life.  For  he  was  tortured  by  the 
great  questions  where  do  children  come  from 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


51 


and  what  has  the  father  to  do  with  their  origin. 
The  vague  knowledge  of  this  connection  be 
tween  his  investigation  and  his  childhood  his- 
tory has  later  drawn  from  him  the  exclama- 
tion that  it  was  destined  that  he  should  deeply 
occupy  himself  with  the  problem  of  the  bird's 
flight,  for  already  in  his  cradle  he  had  been 
visited  by  a vulture.  To  trace  the  curiosity 
which  is  directed  to  the  flight  of  the  bird  to  the 
infantile  sexual  investigation  will  be  a later 
task  which  will  not  be  difficult  to  accomplish. 


Ill 

The  element  of  the  vulture  represents  to  us 
the  real  memory  content  in  Leonardo's  child- 
hood phantasy;  the  association  into  which  Leo- 
nardo himself  placed  his  phantasy  threw  a 
bright  light  on  the  importance  of  this  content 
for  his  later  life.  In  continuing  the  work  of 
interpretation  we  now  encounter  the  strange 
problem  why  this  memory  content  was  elabo- 
rated into  a homosexual  situation.  The 
mother  who  nursed  the  child,  or  rather  from 
whom  the  child  suckled  was  transformed  into 
a vulture  which  stuck  its  tail  into  the  child’s 
mouth.  We  maintain  that  the  “coda”  (tail) 
of  the  vulture,  following  the  common  substitut- 
ing usages  of  language,  cannot  signify  any- 
thing else  but  a male  genital  or  penis.  But  we 
do  not  understand  how  the  phantastic  activity 
came  to  furnish  precisely  this  maternal  bird 
with  the  mark  of  masculinity,  and  in  view  of 

52 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


53 


this  absurdity  we  become  confused  at  the  possi- 
bility of  reducing  this  phantastic  structure  to 
rational  sense. 

However,  we  must  not  despair.  How  many 
seemingly  absurd  dreams  have  we  not  forced 
to  give  up  their  sense ! Why  should  it  become 
more  difficult  to  accomplish  this  in  a childhood 
phantasy  than  in  a dream! 

Let  us  remember  the  fact  that  it  is  not  good 
to  find  one  isolated  peculiarity,  and  let  us  has- 
ten to  add  another  to  it  which  is  still  more 
striking. 

The  vulture-headed  goddess  Mut  of  the 
Egyptians,  a figure  of  altogether  impersonal' 
character,  as  expressed  by  Drexel  in  Roscher's 
lexicon,  was  often  fused  with  other  maternal 
deities  of  living  individuality  like  Isis  and 
Hathor,  but  she  retained  besides  her  separate 
existence  and  reverence.  It  was  especially 
characteristic  of  the  Egyptian  pantheon  that 
the  individual  gods  did  not  perish  in  this  amal- 
gamation. Besides  the  composition  of  deities 
the  simple  divine  image  remained  in  her  inde- 
pendence. In  most  representations  the  vul- 
ture-headed maternal  deity  was  formed  by  the 


54 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


Egyptians  in  a phallic  manner,1  her  body  which 
was  distinguished  as  feminine  by  its  breasts 
also  bore  the  masculine  member  in  a state  of 
erection. 

The  goddess  Mut  thus  evinced  the  same 
union  of  maternal  and  paternal  characteristics 
as  in  Leonardo’s  vulture  phantasy.  Should  we 
explain  this  concurrence  by  the  assumption  that 
Leonardo  knew  from  studying  his  book  the 
androgynous  nature  of  the  maternal  vulture? 
Such  possibility  is  more  than  questionable;  it 
seems  that  the  sources  accessible  to  him  con- 
tained nothing  of  remarkable  determination. 
It  is  more  likely  that  here  as  there  the  agree- 
ment is  to  be  traced  to  a common,  effective  and 
unknown  motive. 

Mythology  can  teach  us  that  the  androgy- 
nous formation,  the  union  of  masculine  and 
feminine  sex  characteristics,  did  not  belong  to 
the  goddess  Mut  alone  but  also  to  other  deities 
such  as  Isis  and  Hathor,  but  in  the  latter  per- 
haps only  insofar  as  they  possessed  also  a 
motherly  nature  and  became  fused  with  the 
goddess  Mut.2  It  teaches  us  further  that 

1 See  the  illustrations  in  Lanzone  1.  c.  T.  CXXXVI-VIII 

7 v.  Romer  1.  c. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


55 


other  Egyptian  deities  such  as  Neith  of  Sais 
out  of  whom  the  Greek  Athene  was  later 
formed,  were  originally  conceived  as  androg- 
ynous or  dihermaphroditic,  and  that  the  same 
held  true  for  many  of  the  Greek  gods,  espe- 
cially of  the  Dionysian  circle,  as  well  as  for 
Aphrodite  who  was  later  restricted  to  a femi- 
nine love  deity.  Mythology  may  also  offer 
the  explanation  that  the  phallus  which  was 
added  to  the  feminine  body  was  meant  to  de- 
note the  creative  primitive  force  of  nature,  and 
that  all  these  hermaphroditic  deistic  forma- 
tions express  the  idea  that  only  a union  of  the 
masculine  and  feminine  elements  can  result  in 
a worthy  representation  of  divine  perfection. 
But  none  of  these  observations  explain  the 
psychological  riddle,  namely,  that  the  phan- 
tasy of  men  takes  no  offense  at  the  fact  that  a 
figure  which  was  to  embody  the  essence  of  the 
mother  should  be  provided  with  the  mark  of 
the  masculine  power  which  is  the  opposite  of 
motherhood. 

The  explanation  comes  from  the  infantile 
sexual  theories.  There  really  was  a time  in 
which  the  male  genital  was  found  to  be  com- 


56  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

patible  with  the  representation  of  the  mother. 
When  the  male  child  first  directs  his  curiosity 
to  the  riddle  of  the  sexual  life,  he  is  dominated 
by  the  interest  for  his  own  genitals.  He  finds 
this  part  of  the  body  too  valuable  and  too  im- 
portant to  believe  that  it  would  be  missing  in 
other  persons  to  whom  he  feels  such  a resem- 
blance. As  he  cannot  divine  that  there  is  still 
another  equally  valuable  type  of  genital  forma- 
tion he  must  grasp  the  assumption  that  all  per- 
sons, also  women,  possess  such  a member  as  he. 
This  preconception  is  so  firm  in  the  youthful 
investigator  that  it  is  not  destroyed  even  by 
the  first  observation  of  the  genitals  in  little 
girls.  His  perception  naturally  tells  him  that 
there  is  something  different  here  than  in  him, 
but  he  is  unable  to  admit  to  himself  as  the  con- 
tent of  this  perception  that  he  cannot  find  this 
member  in  girls.  That  this  member  may  be 
missing  is  to  him  a dismal  and  unbearable 
thought,  and  he  therefore  seeks  to  reconcile  it 
by  deciding  that  it  also  exists  in  girls  but  it 
is  still  very  small  and  that  it  will  grow  later.3 

3 Cf.  the  observations  in  the  Jahrbuch  fur  Psychoanalytische 
und  Psychopatbologische  Forschungen,  Vol.  I,  1909. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


57 


If  this  expectation  does  not  appear  to  be  ful- 
filled on  later  observation  he  has  at  his  disposal 
another  way  of  escape.  The  member  also  ex- 
isted in  the  little  girl  but  it  was  cut  off  and  on 
its  place  there  remained  a wound.  This  prog- 
ress of  the  theory  already  makes  use  of  his  own 
painful  experience;  he  was  threatened  in  the 
meantime  that  this  important  organ  will  be 
taken  away  from  him  if  it  will  form  too  much 
of  an  interest  for  his  occupation.  Under  the 
influence  of  this  threat  of  castration  he  now 
interprets  his  conception  of  the  female  genital, 
henceforth  he  will  tremble  for  his  masculinity, 
but  at  the  same  time  he  will  look  with  contempt 
upon  those  unhappy  creatures  upon  whom,  in 
his  opinion,  this  cruel  punishment  had  already 
been  visited. 

Before  the  child  came  under  the  domination 
of  the  castration  complex,  at  the  time  when  he 
still  held  the  woman  at  her  full  value,  he  began 
to  manifest  an  intensive  desire  to  look  as  an 
erotic  activity  of  his  impulse.  He  wished  to 
see  the  genitals  of  other  persons,  originally 
probably  because  he  wished  to  compare  them 
with  his  own.  The  erotic  attraction  which 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


58 

emanated  from  the  person  of  his  mother  soon 
reached  its  height  in  the  longing  to  see  her 
genital  which  he  believed  to  be  a penis.  With 
the  cognition  acquired  only  later  that  the 
woman  has  no  penis,  this  longing  often  be- 
comes transformed  into  its  opposite  and  gives 
place  to  disgust,  which  in  the  years  of  puberty 
may  become  the  cause  of  psychic  impotence,  of 
misogyny  and  of  lasting  homosexuality.  But 
the  fixation  on  the  once  so  vividly  desired  ob- 
ject, the  penis  of  the  woman,  leaves  inerad- 
icable traces  in  the  psychic  life  of  the  child, 
which  has  gone  through  that  fragment  of  in- 
fantile sexual  investigation  with  particular 
thoroughness.  The  fetich-like  reverence  for 
the  feminine  foot  and  shoe  seems  to  take  the 
foot  only  as  a substitutive  symbol  for  the  once 
revered  and  since  then  missed  member  of  the 
woman.  The  “braid-slashers"  without  know- 
ing it  play  the  part  of  persons  who  perform  the 
act  of  castration  on  the  female  genital. 

One  will  not  gain  any  correct  understanding 
of  the  activities  of  the  infantile  sexuality  and 
probably  will  consider  these  communications 
unworthy  of  belief,  as  long  as  one  does  not  re- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


59 


linquish  the  attitude  of  our  cultural  deprecia- 
tion of  the  genitals  and  of  the  sexual  functions 
in  general.  To  understand  the  infantile  psy- 
chic life  one  has  to  look  to  analogies  from 
primitive  times.  For  a long  series  of  genera- 
tions we  have  been  in  the  habit  of  considering 
the  genitals  or  pudenda  as  objects  of  shame, 
and  in  the  case  of  more  successful  sexual  re- 
pression as  objects  of  disgust.  The  majority 
of  those  living  to-day  only  reluctantly  obey  the 
laws  of  propagation,  feeling  thereby  that  their 
human  dignity  is  being  offended  and  degraded. 
What  exists  among  us  of  the  other  conception 
of  the  sexual  life  is  found  only  in  the  unculti- 
vated and  in  the  lower  social  strata;  among  the 
higher  and  more  refined  types  it  is  concealed  as 
culturally  inferior,  and  its  activity  is  ventured 
only  under  the  embittered  admonition  of  a 
guilty  conscience.  It  was  quite  different  in 
the  primitive  times  of  the  human  race.  From 
the  laborious  collections  of  students  of  civiliza- 
tion one  gains  the  conviction  that  the  genitals 
were  originally  the  pride  and  hope  of  living  be- 
ings, they  enjoyed  divine  worship,  and  the 
divine  nature  of  their  functions  was  trans- 


6o 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


ported  to  all  newly  acquired  activities  of  man- 
kind. Through  sublimation  of  its  essential 
elements  there  arose  innumerable  god-figures, 
and  at  the  time  when  the  relation  of  official  re- 
ligions with  sexual  activity  was  already  hidden 
from  the  general  consciousness,  secret  cults 
labored  to  preserve  it  alive  among  a number  of 
the  initiated.  In  the  course  of  cultural  devel- 
opment it  finally  happened  that  so  much  godli- 
ness and  holiness  had  been  extracted  from  sex- 
uality that  the  exhausted  remnant  fell  into  con- 
tempt. But  considering  the  indestructibility 
which  is  in  the  nature  of  all  psychic  impressions 
one  need  not  wonder  that  even  the  most  prim- 
itive forms  of  genital  worship  could  be  demon- 
strated until  quite  recent  times,  and  that  lan- 
guage, customs  and  superstitions  of  present 
day  humanity  contain  the  remnants  of  all 
phases  of  this  course  of  development.4 

Important  biological  analogies  have  taught 
us  that  the  psychic  development  of  the  individ- 
ual is  a short  repetition  of  the  course  of  devel- 
opment of  the  race,  and  we  shall  therefore  not 
find  improbable  what  the  psychoanalytic  in- 

4 Cf.  Richard  Payne  Knight:  The  Cult  of  Priapus. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  61 

vestigation  of  the  child’s  psyche  asserts  con- 
cerning the  infantile  estimation  of  the  genitals. 
The  infantile  assumption  of  the  maternal  penis 
is  thus  the  common  source  of  origin  for  the 
androgynous  formation  of  the  maternal  dei- 
ties like  the  Egyptian  goddess  Mut  and  the  vul- 
ture’s “coda”  (tail)  in  Leonardo’s  childhood 
phantasy.  As  a matter  of  fact,  it  is  only 
through  misunderstanding  that  these  deistic 
representations  are  designated  hermaphroditic 
in  the  medical  sense  of  the  word.  In  none  of 
them  is  there  a union  of  the  true  genitals  of 
both  sexes  as  they  are  united  in  some  deformed 
beings  to  the  disgust  of  every  human  eye ; but 
besides  the  breast  as  a mark  of  motherhood 
there  is  also  the  male  member,  just  as  it  ex- 
isted in  the  first  imagination  of  the  child  about 
his  mother’s  body.  Mythology  has  retained 
for  the  faithful  this  revered  and  very  early 
fancied  bodily  formation  of  the  mother.  The 
prominence  given  to  the  vulture-tail  in  Leo- 
nardo’s phantasy  we  can  now  translate  as  fol- 
lows : At  that  time  when  I directed  my  tender 

curiosity  to  my  mother  I still  adjudged  to  her  a 
genital  like  my  own.  A further  testimonial 


62 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


of  Leonardo's  precocious  sexual  investigation, 
which  in  our  opinion  became  decisive  for  his 
entire  life* 

A brief  reflection  now  admonishes  us  that 
we  should  not  be  satisfied  with  the  explanation 
of  the  vulture-tail  in  Leonardo's  childhood 
phantasy.  It  seems  as  if  it  contained  more 
than  we  as  yet  understand.  For  its  more 
striking  feature  really  consisted  in  the  fact  that 
the  nursing  at  the  mother's  breast  was  trans- 
formed into  being  nursed,  that  is  into  a passive 
act  which  thus  gives  the  situation  an  undoubted 
homosexual  character.  Mindful  of  the  his- 
torical probability  that  Leonardo  behaved  in 
life  as  a homosexual  in  feeling,  the  question  ob- 
trudes itself  whether  this  phantasy  does  not 
point  to  a causal  connection  between  Leonar- 
do’s childhood  relations  to  his  mother  and  the 
later  manifest,  if  only  ideal,  homosexuality. 
We  would  not  venture  to  draw  such  conclusion 
from  Leonardo's  disfigured  reminiscence  were 
it  not  for  the  fact  that  we  know  from  our 
psychoanalytic  investigation  of  homosexual 
patients  that  such  a relation  exists,  indeed  it 
really  is  an  intimate  and  necessary  relation. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  63 

Homosexual  men  who  have  started  in  our 
times  an  energetic  action  against  the  legal 
limitations  of  their  sexual  activity  are  fond  of 
representing  themselves  through  theoretical 
spokesmen  as  evincing  a sexual  variation, 
which  may  be  distinguished  from  the  very  be- 
ginning, as  an  intermediate  stage  of  sex  or  as 
“a  third  sex.”  In  other  words,  they  maintain 
that  they  are  men  who  are  forced  by  organic 
determinants  originating  in  the  germ  to  find 
that  pleasure  in  the  man  which  they  cannot  feel 
in  the  woman.  As  much  as  one  would  wish  to 
subscribe  to  their  demands  out  of  humane  con- 
siderations, one  must  nevertheless  exercise  re- 
serve regarding  their  theories  which  were 
formulated  without  regard  for  the  psychic 
genesis  of  homosexuality.  Psychoanalysis  of 
fers  the  means  to  fill  this  gap  and  to  put  to  test 
the  assertions  of  the  homosexuals.  It  is  true 
that  psychoanalysis  fulfilled  this  task  in  only  a 
small  number  of  people,  but  all  investigation 
thus  far  undertaken  brought  the  same  surpris- 
ing results.5  In  all  our  male  homosexuals 

5 Prominently  among*  those  who  undertook  these  investiga- 
tions are  I.  Sadger,  whose  results  I can  essentially  corroborate 


64  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

there  was  a very  intensive  erotic  attachment  to 
a feminine  person,  as  a rule  to  the  mother, 
which  was  manifest  in  the  very  first  period  of 
childhood  and  later  entirely  forgotten  by  the 
individual.  This  attachment  wras  produced  or 
favored  by  too  much  love  from  the  mother  her- 
self, but  was  also  furthered  by  the  retirement 
or  absence  of  the  father  during  the  childhood 
period.  Sadger  emphasizes  the  fact  that  the 
mothers  of  his  homosexual  patients  were  often 
man-women,  or  women  writh  energetic  traits  of 
character  who  were  able  to  crowd  out  the 
father  from  the  place  allotted  to  him  in  the 
family.  I have  sometimes  observed  the  same 
thing,  but  I was  more  impressed  by  those  cases 
in  which  the  father  was  absent  from  the  be- 
ginning or  disappeared  early  so  that  the  boy 
was  altogether  under  feminine  influence.  It 
almost  seems  that  the  presence  of  a strong 
father  would  assure  for  the  son  the  proper  de- 
cision in  the  selection  of  his  object  from  the  op- 
posite sex. 

from  my  own  experience.  I am  also  aware  that  Stekel  of 
Vienna,  Ferenczi  of  Budapest,  and  Brill  of  New  York,  came 
to  the  same  conclusions. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  65 

Following  this  primary  stage,  a transfor- 
mation takes  place  whose  mechanisms  we  know 
but  whose  motive  forces  we  have  not  yet 
grasped.  The  love  of  the  mother  cannot  con- 
tinue to  develop  consciously  so  that  it  merges 
into  repression.  The  boy  represses  the  love 
for  the  mother  by  putting  himself  in  her  place, 
by  identifying  himself  with  her,  and  by  taking 
his  own  person  as  a model  through  the  simi- 
larity of  which  he  is  guided  in  the  selection  of 
his  love  object.  He  thus  becomes  homosex- 
ual ; as  a matter  of  fact  he  returns  to  the  stage 
of  autoerotism,  for  the  boys  whom  the  grow- 
ing adult  now  loves  are  only  substitutive  per- 
sons or  revivals  of  his  own  childish  person, 
whom  he  loves  in  the  same  way  as  his  mother 
loved  him.  We  say  that  he  finds  his  love  ob- 
ject on  the  road  to  narcism,  for  the  Greek 
legend  called  a boy  Narcissus  to  whom  nothing 
was  more  pleasing  than  his  own  mirrored 
image,  and  who  became  transformed  into  a 
beautiful  flower  of  this  name. 

Deeper  psychological  discussions  justify  the 
assertion  that  the  person  who  becomes  homo- 
sexual in  this  manner  remains  fixed  in  his  un- 


66 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


conscious  on  the  memory  picture  or  his  mother. 
By  repressing  the  love  for  his  mother  he  con- 
serves the  same  in  his  unconscious  and  hence- 
forth remains  faithful  to  her.  When  as  a 
lover  he  seems  to  pursue  boys,  he  really  thus 
runs  away  from  women  who  could  cause  him 
to  become  faithless  to  his  mother.  Through 
direct  observation  of  individual  cases  we  could 
demonstrate  that  he  who  is  seemingly  receptive 
only  of  masculine  stimuli  is  in  reality  influenced 
by  the  charms  emanating  from  women  just  like 
a normal  person,  but  each  and  every  time  he 
hastens  to  transfer  the  stimulus  he  received 
from  the  woman  to  a male  object  and  in  this 
manner  he  repeats  again  and  again  the  mechan- 
ism through  which  he  acquired  his  homosex- 
uality. 

Tt  is  far  from  us  to  exaggerate  the  impor- 
tance of  these  explanations  concerning  the 
psychic  genesis  of  homosexuality.  It  is  quite 
clear  that  they  are  in  crass  opposition  to  the 
official  theories  of  the  homosexual  spokesmen, 
but  we  are  aware  that  these  explanations  are 
not  sufficiently  comprehensive  to  render  pos- 
sible a final  explanation  of  the  problem.  What 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  67 

one  calls  homosexual  for  practical  purposes 
may  have  its  origin  in  a variety  of  psychosex- 
ual  inhibiting  processes,  and  the  process  recog- 
nized by  us  is  perhaps  only  one  among  many, 
and  has  reference  only  to  one  type  of  “homo- 
sexuality.” We  must  also  admit,  that  the 
number  of  cases  in  our  homosexual  type  which 
shows  the  conditions  required  by  us,  exceeds  by 
far  those  cases  in  which  the  resulting  effect 
really  appears,  so  that  even  we  cannot  reject 
the  supposed  cooperation  of  unknown  consti- 
tutional factors  from  which  one  was  otherwise 

wont  to  deduce  the  whole  of  homosexuality. 

* 

As  a matter  of  fact  there  wouid  be  no  occasion 
for  entering  into  the  psychic  genesis  of  the 
form  of  homosexuality  studied  by  us  if  there 
were  not  a strong  presumption  that  Leonardo, 
from  whose  vulture-phantasy  we  started,  really 
belonged  to  this  one  type  of  homosexuality. 

As  little  as  is  known  concerning  the  sexual 
behavior  of  the  great  artist  and  investigator, 
we  must  still  trust  to  the  probability  that  the 
testimonies  of  his  contemporaries  did  not  go 
far  astray.  In  the  light  of  this  tradition  he  ap- 
pears to  us  as  a man  whose  sexual  need  and 


68 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


activity  were  extraordinarily  low,  as  if  a higher 
striVing  had  raised  him  above  the  common  ani- 
mal need  of  mankind  It  may  be  open  to  doubt 
whether  he  ever  sought  direct  sexual  gratifica- 
tion, and  in  what  manner,  or  whether  he  could 
dispense  with  it  altogether.  We  are  justified, 
however,  to  look  also  in  him  for  those  emo- 
tional streams  which  imperatively  force  others 
to  the  sexual  act,  for  we  cannot  imagine  a hu- 
man psychic  life  in  whose  development  the  sex- 
ual desire  in  the  broadest  sense,  the  libido,  has 
not  had  its  share,  whether  the  latter  has  with- 
drawn itself  far  from  the  original  aim  or 
whether  it  was  detained  from  being  put  into 
execution. 

Anything  but  traces  of  unchanged  sexual  de- 
sire we  need  not  expect  in  Leonardo.  These 
point  however  to  one  direction  and  allow  us  to 
count  him  among  homosexuals.  It  has  always 
been  emphasized  that  he  took  as  his  pupils  only 
strikingly  handsome  boys  and  youths.  He 
was  kind  and  considerate  tov/ards  them,  he 
cared  for  them  and  nursed  them  himself  when 
they  were  ill,  just  like  a mother  nurses  her  chil- 
dren, as  his  own  mother  might  have  cared  for 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  69 

him.  As  he  selected  them  on  account  of  their 
beauty  rather  than  their  talent,  none  of  them 
— Cesare  da  Sesto,  G.  Boltraffio,  Andrea  Sa- 
laino,  Francesco  Melzi  and  the  others— '-ever 
became  a prominent  artist.  Most  of  them 
could  not  make  themselves  independent  of  their 
master  and  disappeared  after  his  death  without 
leaving  a more  definite  physiognomy  to  the  his- 
tory of  art.  The  others  who  by  their  produc- 
tions  earned  the  right  to  cal!  themselves  his 
pupils,  as  Luini  and  Bazzi,  nicknamed  Sodoma, 
he  probably  did  not  know  personally. 

We  realize  that  we  will  have  to  face  the  ob- 
jection that  Leonardo's  behavior  towards  his 
pupils  surely  had  nothing  to  do  with  sexual 
motives,  and  permits  no  conclusion  as  to  his 
sexual  peculiarity.  Against  this  we  wish  to 
assert  with  all  caution  that  our  conception  ex- 
plains some  strange  features  in  the  master's  be- 
havior which  otherwise  would  have  remained 
enigmatical.  Leonardo  kept  a diary ; he  made 
entries  in  his  small  hand,  written  from  right  to 
left  which  were  meant  only  for  himself.  It  is 
to  be  noted  that  in  this  diary  he  addressed  him- 
self with  “thou”:  “Learn  from  master  Lucca 


70 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


the  multiplication  of  roots/'6  "Let  master 
d’Abacco  show  thee  the  square  of  the  circle/' 7 
Or  on  the  occasion  of  a journey  he  entered  in 
his  diary: 

"I  am  going  to  Milan  to  look  after  the  affairs 
of  my  garden  . . . order  two  pack-sacks  to  be 
made.  Ask  Boltraffio  to  show  thee  his  turn- 
ing-lathe and  let  him  polish  a stone  on  it. — 
Leave  the  book  to  master  Andrea  il  Todesco/’ 8 
Or  he  wrote  a resolution  of  quite  different  sig- 
nificance: "Thou  must  show  in  thy  treatise 
that  the  earth  is  a star,  like  the  moon  or  resem- 
bling it,  and  thus  prove  the  nobility  of  our 
world/' 9 

In  this  diary,  which  like  the  diaries  of  other 
mortals  often  skim  over  the  most  important 
events  of  the  day  with  only  few  words  or  ig- 
nore them  altogether,  one  finds  a few  entries 
which  on  account  of  their  peculiarity  are  cited 

6 Edm.  Solmi : Leonardo  da  Vinci,  German  translation,  p. 

152. 

7 Solmi,  1.  c.  p.  203. 

8 Leonardo  thus  behaves  like  one  who  was  in  the  habit  of 
making  a daily  confession  to  another  person  whom  he  now- 
replaced  by  his  diary.  For  an  assumption  as  to  who  this 
person  may  have  been  see  Merejkowski,  p.  309. 

9 M.  Herzfeld  : Leonardo  da  Vinci,  1906,  p 141. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


71 


by  all  of  Leonardo’s  biographers.  They  show 
notations  referring  to  the  master’s  petty  ex- 
penses, which  are  recorded  with  painful  ex- 
actitude as  if  coming  from  a pedantic  and 
strictly  parsimonious  family  father,  while  there 
is  nothing  to  show  that  he  spent  greater  sums, 
or  that  the  artist  was  well  versed  in  household 
management.  One  of  these  notes  refers  to  a 
new  cloak  which  he  bought  for  his  pupil 
Andrea  Salaino : 10 


Silver  brocade  Lira  15  Soldi  4 

Crimson  velvet  for  trimming  . . ” 9 ” o 

Braid  ” o ” 9 

Buttons  ” o * 12 


Another  very  detailed  notice  gives  all  the  ex- 
penses which  he  incurred  through  the  bad  qual- 
ities and  the  thieving  tendencies  of  another 
pupil  or  model:  “On  21st  day  of  April,  1490, 

I started  this  book  and  started  again  the 
horse.11  Jacomo  came  to  me  on  Magdalene 
day,  1490,  at  the  age  of  ten  years  (marginal 
note:  thievish,  mendacious,  willful,  glutton- 
ous). On  the  second  day  I ordered  for  him 

10  The  wording  is  that  of  Merejkowski.  ? c.  p 2 37. 

11  The  equestrian  monument  of  Francesco  Sforza. 


72 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


two  shirts,  a pair  of  pants,  and  a jacket,  and  as 
1 put  the  money  away  to  pay  for  the  things 
named  he  stole  the  money  from  my  purse,  and 
it  was  never  possible  to  make  him  confess,  al- 
though I was  absolutely  sure  of  it  . (marginal 
note:  4 Lira  . . So  the  report  continues 

concerning  the  misdeeds  of  the  little  boy  and 
concludes  with  the  expense  account:  “In  the 

first  year,  a cloak,  Lira  2:  6 shirts,  Lira  4:  3 
jackets,  Lira  6:  4 pair  of  socks,  Lira  7,  etc/’ 12 
Leonardo’s  biographers,  to  whom  nothing 
was  further  than  to  solve  the  riddle  in  the 
psychic  life  of  their  hero  from  these  slight 
weaknesses  and  peculiarities,  were  wont  to  re- 
mark in  connection  with  these  peculiar  accounts 
that  they  emphasized  the  kindness  and  consid- 
eration of  the  master  for  his  pupils.  They  for- 
get thereby  that  it  is  not  Leonardo’s  behavior 
that  needs  an  explanation,  but  the  fact  that  he 
left  us  these  testimonies  of  it.  As  it  is  impos- 
sible to  ascribe  to  him  the  motive  of  smuggling 
into  our  hands  proofs  of  his  kindness,  we  must 
assume  that  another  affective  motive  caused 
him  to  write  this  down.  It  is  not  easy  to  con- 

12  The  full  wording  is  found  in  M.  Herzfeid,  1.  c.  p.  45. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


73 


jecture  what  this  motive  was,  and  we  could  not 
give  any  if  not  for  another  account  found 
among  Leonardo’s  papers  which  throws  a bril- 
liant light  on  these  peculiarly  petty  notices 
about  his  pupils’  clothes,  and  others  of  a 
kind: 13 


Burial  expenses  following  the  death  of 

Caterina  . . . . 

2 pounds  wax * 

Cataphalc 

For  the  transportation  and  erection  of 

the  cross  

Pall  bearers 

To  4 priests  and  4 clerics 

Ringing  of  bells 

To  grave  diggers  

For  the  approval — to  the  officials 


27  florins 
18  ” 


4 

8 

20 

2 

16 

1 


» 


To  sum  up 108  florins 

Previous  expenses: 

To  the  doctor  4 florins 

For  sugar  and  candles  . . 12  ” 

16  florins 


Sum  total 124  florins 

13  Merejkowski  1.  c. — As  a disappointing  illustration  of  the 
vagueness  of  the  information  concerning  Leonardo’s  intimate 


74 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


The  writer  Merejkowski  is  the  only  one  who 
can  tell  us  who  this  Caterina  was.  From  two 
different  short  notices  he  concludes  that  she 
was  the  mother  of  Leonardo,  the  poor  peasant 
woman  from  Vinci,  who  came  to  Milan  in 
14 93  to  visit  her  son  then  41  years  old.  While 
on  this  visit  she  fell  ill  and  was  taken  to  the 
hospital  by  Leonardo,  and  following  her  death 
she  was  buried  by  her  son  with  such  sumptuous 
funeral.14 

This  deduction  of  the  psychological  writer  of 
romances  is  not  capable  of  proof,  but  it  can  lay 
claim  to  so  many  inner  probabilities,  it  agrees 
so  well  with  everything  we  know  besides  about 
Leonardo’s  emotional  activity  that  I cannot  re- 
frain from  accepting  it  as  correct.  Leonardo 
succeeded  in  forcing  his  feelings  under  the  yoke 

life,  meager  as  it  is,  I mention  the  fact  that  the  same  expense 
account  is  given  by  Solmi  with  considerable  variation  (German 
translation,  p.  104).  The  most  serious  difference  is  the  substi- 
tution of  florins  by  soldi.  One  may  assume  that  in  this  ac- 
count florins  do  not  mean  the  old  “gold  florins,”  but  those  used 
at  a later  period  which  amounted  to  1%  lira  or  33^  soldi. — 
Solmi  represents  Caterina  as  a servant  who  had  taken  care  of 
Leonardo’s  household  for  a certain  time.  The  source  from 
which  the  two  representations  of  this  account  were  taken  was 
not  accessible  to  me. 

14  “Caterina  came  in  July,  1493. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


75 


of  investigation  and  in  inhibiting  their  free  ut- 
terance, but  even  in  him  there  were  episodes  in 
which  the  suppression  obtained  expression,  and 
one  of  these  was  the  death  of  his  mother  whom 
he  once  loved  so  ardently.  Through  this  ac- 
count of  the  burial  expenses  he  represents  to  us 
the  mourning  of  his  mother  in  an  almost  un- 
recognizable distortion.  We  wonder  how  such 
a distortion  could  have  come  about,  and  we  cer- 
tainly cannot  grasp  it  when  viewed  under  nor- 
mal mental  processes.  But  similar  mecha- 
nisms are  familiar  to  us  under  the  abnormal 
conditions  of  neuroses,  and  especially  in  the  so- 
called  compulsion  neurosis.  Here  one  can  ob- 
serve how  the  expressions  of  more  intensive 
feelings  have  been  displaced  to  trivial  and  even 
foolish  performances.  The  opposing  forces 
succeeded  in  debasing  the  expression  of  these 
repressed  feelings  to  such  an  extent  that  one  is 
forced  to  estimate  the  intensity  of  these  feel- 
ings as  extremely  unimportant,  but  the  impera- 
tive compulsion  with  which  these  insignificant 
acts  express  themselves  betrays  the  real  force 
of  the  feelings  which  are  rooted  in  the  uncon- 
scious, which  consciousness  would  wish  to  dis- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


76 

avow.  Only  by  bearing  in  mind  the  mecha- 
nisms of  compulsion  neurosis  can  one  explain 
Leonardo’s  account  of  the  funeral  expenses  of 
his  mother.  In  his  unconscious  he  was  still 
tied  to  her  as  in  childhood,  by  erotically  tinged 
feelings;  the  opposition  of  the  repression  of 
this  childhood  love  which  appeared  later  stood 
in  the  way  of  erecting  to  her  in  his  diary  a 
different  and  more  dignified  monument,  but 
what  resulted  as  a compromise  of  this  neurotic 
conflict  had  to  be  put  in  operation  and  hence 
the  account  was  entered  in  the  diary  which  thus 
came  to  the  knowledge  of  posterity  as  some- 
thing incomprehensible. 

It  is  not  venturing  far  to  transfer  the  in- 
terpretation obtained  from  the  funeral  ex- 
penses to  the  accounts  dealing  with  his  pupils. 
Accordingly  we  would  say  that  here  also  we 
deal  with  a case  in  which  Leonardo’s  meager 
remnants  of  libidinous  feelings  compulsively 
obtained  a distorted  expression.  The  mother 
and  the  pupils,  the  very  images  of  his  own  boy- 
ish beauty,  would  be  his  sexual  objects — as  far 
as  his  sexual  repression  dominating  his  nature 
would  allow  such  manifestations — and  the 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


77 


compulsion  to  note  with  painful  circumstantial- 
ity  his  expenses  on  their  behalf,  would  desig- 
nate the  strange  betrayal  of  his  rudimentary 
conflicts.  From  this  we  would  conclude  that 
Leonardo’s  love-life  really  belonged  to  that 
type  of  homosexuality,  the  psychic  development 
of  which  we  were  able  to  disclose,  and  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  homosexual  situation  in  his 
vulture-phantasy  would  become  comprehen- 
sible to  us,  for  it  states  nothing  more  or  less 
than  what  we  have  asserted  before  concerning 
that  type.  It  requires  the  following  interpre- 
tation: Through  the  erotic  relations  to  my 

mother  1 became  a homosexual.15 

15  The  manner  of  expression  through  which  the  repressed 
libidio  could  manifest  itself  in  Leonardo,  such  as  circum- 
stantiality and  marked  interest  in  money,  belongs  to  those 
traits  of  character  which  emanate  from  anal  eroticism.  C'f. 
Character  und  Analerotik  in  the  second  series  of  my  Samm- 
lung  zur  Neurosenlehre,  1909,  also  Brill’s  Psychoanalysis,  its 
Theories  and  Practical  Applications,  Chap.  XIII,  Anal  Eroti- 
cism and  Character,  Saunders,  Philadelphia. 


IV 

The  vulture  phantasy  of  Leonardo  still  ab- 
sorbs our  interest.  In  words  which  only  too 
plainly  recall  a sexual  act  (“and  has  many 
times  struck  against  my  lips  with  his  tail”), 
Leonardo  emphasizes  the  intensity  of  the  erotic 
relations  between  the  mother  and  the  child.  A 
second  memory  content  of  the  phantasy  can 
readily  be  conjectured  from  the  association  of 
the  activity  of  the  mother  (of  the  vulture)  with 
the  accentuation  of  the  mouth  zone.  We  can 
translate  it  as  follows:  My  mother  has 

pressed  on  my  mouth  innumerable  passionate 
kisses.  The  phantasy  is  composed  of  the 
memories  of  being  nursed  and  of  being  kissed 
by  the  mother. 

A kindly  nature  has  bestowed  upon  the  artist 
the  capacity  to  express  in  artistic  productions 
his  most  secret  psychic  feelings  hidden  even  to 
himself,  which  powerfully  affect  outsiders  who 

78 


MONA  LISA 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


79 


are  strangers  to  the  artist  without  their  being 
able  to  state  whence  this  emotivity  comes. 
Should  there  be  no  evidence  in  Leonardo's  work 
of  that  which  his  memory  retained  as  the 
strongest  impression  of  his  childhood?  One 
would  have  to  expect  it.  However,  when  one 
considers  what  profound  transformations  an 
impression  of  an  artist  has  to  experience  before 
it  can  add  its  contribution  to  the  work  of  art, 
one  is  obliged  to  moderate  considerably  his  ex- 
pectation of  demonstrating  something  definite. 
This  is  especially  true  in  the  case  of  Leonardo. 

He  who  thinks  of  Leonardo's  paintings  will 
be  reminded  by  the  remarkably  fascinating  and 
puzzling  smile  which  he  enchanted  on  the  lips 
of  all  his  feminine  figures.  It  is  a fixed  smile 
on  elongated,  sinuous  lips  which  is  considered 
characteristic  of  him  and  is  preferentially  des- 
ignated as  “Leonardesque.”  In  the  singular 
and  beautiful  visage  of  the  Florentine  Monna 
Lisa  del  Giocondo  it  has  produced  the  greatest 
effect  on  the  spectators  and  even  perplexed 
them.  This  smile  was  in  need  of  an  interpre- 
tation, and  received  many  of  the  most  varied 
kind  but  none  of  them  was  considered  satis- 


8o 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


factory.  As  Gruyer  puts  it:  “It  is  almost 

four  centuries  since  Monna  Lisa  causes  all 
those  to  lose  their  heads  who  have  looked  upon 
her  for  some  time.”  1 

Muther  states:2  “What  fascinates  the 
spectator  is  the  demoniacal  charm  of  this  smile. 
Hundreds  of  poets  and  writers  have  written 
about  this  woman,  who  now  seems  to  smile 
upon  us  seductively  and  now  to  stare  coldly 
and  lifelessly  into  space,  but  nobody  has  solved 
the  riddle  of  her  smile,  nobody  has  interpreted 
her  thoughts.  Everything,  even  the  scenery  is 
mysterious  and  dream-like,  trembling  as  if  in 
the  sultriness  of  sensuality.” 

The  idea  that  two  diverse  elements  were 
united  in  the  smile  of  Monna  Lisa  has  been  felt 
by  many  critics.  They  therefore  recognize  in 
the  play  of  features  of  the  beautiful  Floren- 
tine lady  the  most  perfect  representation  of  the 
contrasts  dominating  the  love-life  of  the 
woman  which  is  foreign  to  man,  as  that  of  re- 
serve and  seduction,  and  of  most  devoted  ten- 
derness and  inconsiderateness  in  urgent  and 

1 Seidlitz : Leonardo  da  Vinci,  II  Bd.,  p.  280. 

2Geschichte  der  Malerei,  Bd.  I,  p.  314* 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


81 


consuming  sensuality.  Muntz 3 expresses  him- 
self in  this  manner:  “One  knows  what  inde- 

cipherable and  fascinating  enigma  Monna  Lisa 
Gioconda  has  been  putting  for  nearly  four  cen- 
turies to  the  admirers  who  crowd  around  her. 
No  artist  (I  borrow  the  expression  of  the  deli- 
cate writer  who  hides  himself  under  the  pseu- 
donym of  Pierre  de  Corlay)  has  ever  trans- 
lated in  this  manner  the  very  essence  of 
femininity:  the  tenderness  and  coquetry,  the 
modesty  and  quiet  voluptuousness,  the  whole 
mystery  of  the  heart  which  holds  itself  aloof, 
of  a brain  which  reflects,  and  of  a personality 
who  watches  itself  and  yields  nothing  from  her- 
self except  radiance.  . . ” The  Italian  An- 
gelo Conti 4 saw  the  picture  in  the  Louvre  il- 
lumined by  a ray  of  the  sun  and  expressed  him- 
self as  follows:  “The  woman  smiled  with  a 

royal  calmness,  her  instincts  of  conquest,  of 
ferocity,  the  entire  heredity  of  the  species,  the 
will  of  seduction  and  ensnaring,  the  charm  of 
the  deceiver,  the  kindness  which  conceals  a 

3 1.  c.  p.  417. 

* A.  Conti : Leonardo  pittore,  Conferenze  Florentine,  1.  c. 
P.  93* 


8a 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


cruel  purpose,  all  that  appears  and  disappears 
alternately  behind  the  laughing  veil  and  melts 
into  the  poem  of  her  smile.  . . . Good  and 
evil,  cruelty  and  compassion,  graceful  and  cat- 
like, she  laughed,.  . . 

Leonardo  painted  this  picture  four  years, 
perhaps  from  1503  until  1507,  during  his  sec- 
ond sojourn  in  Florence  when  he  was  about  the 
age  of  fifty  years.  According  to  Vasari  he  ap- 
plied the  choicest  artifices  in  order  to  divert  the 
lady  during  the  sittings  and  to  hold  that  smile 
firmly  on  her  features.  Of  all  the  graceful- 
ness that  his  brush  reproduced  on  the  canvas 
at  that  time  the  picture  preserves  but  very  lit- 
tle in  its  present  state.  During  its  production 
it  was  considered  the  highest  that  art  could 
accomplish;  it  is  certain,  however,  that  it  did 
not  satisfy  Leonardo  himself,  that  he  pro- 
nounced it  as  unfinished  and  did  not  deliver  it 
to  the  one  who  ordered  it,  but  took  it  with  him 
to  France  where  his  benefactor  Francis  I,  ac- 
quired it  for  the  Louvre. 

Let  us  leave  the  physiognomic  riddle  of 
Monna  Lisa  unsolved,  and  let  us  note  the  un- 
equivocal fact  that  her  smile  fascinated  the  art- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  83 

ist  no  less  than  all  the  spectators  for  these  400 
years.  This  captivating  smile  had  thereafter 
returned  in  all  of  his  pictures  and  in  those  of 
his  pupils.  As  Leonardo's  Monna  Lisa  was  a 
portrait  we  cannot  assume  that  he  has  added 
to  her  face  a trait  of  his  own  so  difficult  to  ex- 
press which  she  herself  did  not  possess.  It 
seems,  we  cannot  help  but  believe,  that  he  found 
this  smile  in  his  model  and  became  so  charmed 
by  it  that  from  now  on  he  endowed  it  on  all 
the  free  creations  of  his  phantasy.  This  ob- 
vious conception  is,  e.g.?  expressed  by  A.  Kon- 
stantinowa  in  the  following  manner: 5 

“During  the  long  period  in  which  the  master 
occupied  himself  with  the  portrait  of  Monna 
Lisa  del  Gioconda,  he  entered  into  the  physi- 
ognomic delicacies  of  this  feminine  face  with 
such  sympathy  of  feeling  that  he  transferred 
these  creatures,  especially  the  mysterious  smile 
and  the  peculiar  glance,  to  all  faces  which  he 
later  painted  or  drew.  The  mimic  peculiarity 
of  Cioconda  can  even  be  perceived  in  the  pic- 
ture of  John  the  Baptist  in  the  Louvre.  But 
above  all  they  are  distinctly  recognized  in  the 

5 L c.  p.  45. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


84 

features  of  Mary  in  the  picture  of  St.  Anne  of 
the  Louvre/' 

But  the  case  could  have  been  different.  The 
need  for  a deeper  reason  for  the  fascination 
which  the  smile  of  Gioconda  exerted  on  the 
artist  from  which  he  could  not  rid  himself  has 
been  felt  by  more  than  one  of  his  biographers. 
W.  Pater,  who  sees  in  the  picture  of  Monna 
Lisa  the  embodiment  of  the  entire  erotic  ex- 
perience of  modern  man,  and  discourses  so  ex- 
cellently on  “that  unfathomable  smile  always 
with  a touch  of  something  sinister  in  it,  which 
plays  over  all  Leonardo's  work,”  leads  us  to 
another  track  when  he  says:6 

“Besides,  the  picture  is  a portrait.  From 
childhood  we  see  this  image  defining  itself  on 
the  fabric  of  his  dream;  and  but  for  express 
historical  testimony,  we  might  fancy  that  this 
was  but  his  ideal  lady,  embodied  and  beheld  at 
last.” 

Herzfeld  surely  must  have  had  something 
similar  in  mind  when  stating  that  in  Monna 
Lisa  Leonardo  encountered  himself  and  there- 

6 W.  Pater:  The  Renaissance,  p.  124,  The  Macmillan  Co., 

19/0. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


85 

fore  found  it  possible  to  put  so  much  of  his  own 
nature  into  the  picture,  “whose  features  from 
time  immemorial  have  been  imbedded  with 
mysterious  sympathy  in  Leonardo’s  soul.”  7 

Let  us  endeavor  to  clear  up  these  intimations. 
It  was  quite  possible  that  Leonardo  was  fasci- 
nated by  the  smile  of  Monna  Lisa,  because  it 
had  awakened  something  in  him  which  had 
slumbered  in  his  soul  for  a long  time,  in  all 
probability  an  old  memory.  This  memory  was 
of  sufficient  importance  to  stick  to  him  once  it 
had  been  aroused ; he  was  forced  continually  to 
provide  it  with  new  expression.  The  assur- 
ance of  Pater  that  we  can  see  an  image  like  that 
of  Monna  Lisa  defining  itself  from  Leonardo’s 
childhood  on  the  fabric  of  his  dreams,  seems 
worthy  of  belief  and  deserves  to  be  taken  liter- 
ally. 

Vasari  mentions  as  Leonardo’s  first  artistic 
endeavors,  “heads  of  women  who  laugh.” 8 
The  passage,  which  is  beyond  suspicion,  as  it 
is  not  meant  to  prove  anything,  reads  more  pre- 
cisely as  follows:  9 “He  formed  in  his  youth 

7 M.  Herzfeld : Leonardo  da  Vinci,  p.  88. 

8 Scognamiglio,  1.  c.  p.  32. 

9L.  Schom,  Bd.  Ill,  1843,  p.  6. 


86 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


some  laughing  feminine  heads  out  of  lime, 
which  have  been  reproduced  in  plaster,  and 
some  heads  of  children,  which  were  as  beauti- 
ful as  if  modeled  by  the  hands  of  a mas- 
ter. . , ” 

Thus  we  discover  that  his  practice  of  art  be- 
gan with  the  representation  of  two  kinds  of  ob- 
jects, which  would  perforce  remind  us  of  the 
two  kinds  of  sexual  objects  which  we  have  in- 
ferred from  the  analysis  of  his  vulture  phan- 
tasy. If  the  beautiful  children’s  heads  were 
reproductions  of  his  own  childish  person,  then 
the  laughing  women  were  nothing  else  but  re- 
productions of  Catarina,  his  mother,  and  we 
are  beginning  to  have  an  inkling  of  the  possi- 
bility that  his  mother  possessed  that  mysteri- 
ous smile  which  he  lost,  and  which  fascinated 
him  so  much  when  he  found  it  again  in  the 
Florentine  lady.10 

The  painting  of  Leonardo  which  in  point 
of  time  stands  nearest  to  the  Monna  Lisa  is 

10  The  same  is  assumed  by  Merejkowski,  who  imagined  a 
childhood  for  Leonardo  which  deviates  in  the  essential  points 
from  ours,  drawn  from  the  results  of  the  vulture  phantasy. 
But  if  Leonardo  himself  had  displayed  this  smile,  tradition 
hardly  would  have  failed  to  report  to  us  this  coincidence. 


T* 


[face 


P-  86] 


SAINT  ANNE 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  87 

the  so-called  Saint  Anne  of  the  Louvre,  repre- 
senting Saint  Anne,  Mary  and  the  Christ  child. 
It  shows  the  Leonardesque  smile  most  beauti- 
fully portrayed  in  the  two  feminine  heads.  It 
is  impossible  to  find  out  how  much  earlier  or 
later  than  the  portrait  of  Monna  Lisa  Leo- 
nardo began  to  paint  this  picture.  As  both 
works  extended  over  years,  we  may  well  as- 
sume that  they  occupied  the  master  simultane- 
ously. But  it  would  best  harmonize  with  our 
expectation  if  precisely  the  absorption  in  the 
features  of  Monna  Lisa  would  have  instigated 
Leonardo  to  form  the  composition  of  Saint 
Anne  from  his  phantasy.  For  if  the  smile  of 
Gioconda  had  conjured  up  in  him  the  memory 
of  his  mother,  we  would  naturally  understand 
that  he  was  first  urged  to  produce  a glorifica- 
tion of  motherhood,  and  to  give  back  to  her  the 
smile  he  found  in  that  prominent  lady.  We 
may  thus  allow  our  interest  to  glide  over  from 
the  portrait  of  Monna  Lisa  to  this  other  hardly 
less  beautiful  picture,  now  also  in  the  Louvre. 

Saint  Anne  with  the  daughter  and  grand- 
child is  a subject  seldom  treated  in  the  Italian 
art  of  painting;  at  all  events  Leonardo's  rep- 


88 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


reservation  differs  widely  from  all  that  is  oth- 
erwise known.  Muther  states: 11 

“Some  masters  like  Hans  Fries,  the  older 
Holbein,  and  Girolamo  dei  Libri,  made  Anne 
sit  near  Mary  and  placed  the  child  between  the 
two.  Others  like  Jakob  Cornelicz  in  his  Ber- 
lin pictures,  represented  Saint  Anne  as  holding 
in  her  arm  the  small  figure  of  Mary  upon  which 
sits  the  still  smaller  figure  of  the  Christ  child.” 
In  Leonardo's  picture  Mary  sits  on  her  moth- 
er's lap,  bent  forward  and  is  stretching  out  both 
arms  after  the  boy  who  plays  with  a little 
lamb,  and  must  have  slightly  maltreated  it. 
The  grandmother  has  one  of  her  unconcealed 
arms  propped  on  her  hip  and  looks  down  on 
both  with  a blissful  smile.  The  grouping  is 
certainly  not  quite  unconstrained.  But  the 
smile  which  is  playing  on  the  lips  of  both 
women,  although  unmistakably  the  same  as  in 
the  picture  of  Monna  Lisa,  has  lost  its  sinister 
and  mysterious  character;  it  expresses  a calm 
blissfulness.12 

11 1.  c.  p.  309. 

158  A.  Konstantinowa,  1.  c.,  says : “ Mary  looks  tenderly 
down  on  her  beloved  child  with  a smile  that  recalls  the  mys- 
terious expression  of  la  Gioconda.”  Elsewhere  speaking  of 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  89 

On  becoming  somewhat  engrossed  in  this 
picture  it  suddenly  dawns  upon  the  spectator 
that  only  Leonardo  could  have  painted  this  pic- 
ture, as  only  he  could  have  formed  the  vulture 
phantasy.  This  picture  contains  the  synthesis 
of  the  history  of  Leonardo’s  childhood,  the  de- 
tails of  which  are  explainable  by  the  most  inti- 
mate impressions  of  his  life.  In  his  father’s 
home  he  found  not  only  the  kind  step-mother 
Donna  Albiera,  but  also  the  grandmother,  his 
father’s  mother,  Monna  Lucia,  who  we  will  as- 
sume was  not  less  tender  to  him  than  grand- 
mothers are  wont  to  be.  This  circumstance 
must  have  furnished  him  with  the  facts  for  the 
representation  of  a childhood  guarded  by  a 
mother  and  grandmother.  Another  striking 
feature  of  the  picture  assumes  still  greater  sig- 
nificance. Saint  Anne,  the  mother  of  Mary 
and  the  grandmother  of  the  boy  who  must  have 
been  a matron,  is  formed  here  perhaps  some- 
what more  mature  and  more  serious  than  Saint 
Mary,  but  still  as  a young  woman  of  unfaded 
beauty.  As  a matter  of  fact  Leonardo  gave 

Mary  she  says:  ‘‘The  smile  of  Gioconda  floats  upon  her 
features.” 


go 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


the  boy  two  mothers,  the  one  who  stretched  out 
her  arms  after  him  and  another  who  is  seen  in 
the  background,  both  are  represented  with  the 
blissful  smile  of  maternal  happiness*  This 
peculiarity  of  the  picture  has  not  failed  to  ex- 
cite the  wonder  of  the  authors.  Muther,  for 
instance,  believes  that  Leonardo  could  not 
bring  himself  to  paint  old  age,  folds  and 
wrinkles,  and  therefore  formed  also  Anne  as  a 
woman  of  radiant  beauty.  Whether  one  can 
be  satisfied  with  this  explanation  is  a question. 
Other  writers  have  taken  occasion  to  deny  gen- 
erally the  sameness  of  age  of  mother  and 
daughter.13  However,  Muther’s  tentative  ex- 
planation is  sufficient  proof  for  the  fact  that 
the  impression  of  Saint  Anne’s  youthful  ap- 
pearance was  furnished  by  the  picture  and  is 
not  an  imagination  produced  by  a tendency. 

Leonardo’s  childhood  was  precisely  as  re- 
markable as  this  picture.  He  has  had  two 
mothers,  the  first  his  true  mother,  Caterina, 
from  whom  he  was  torn  away  between  the  age 
of  three  and  five  years,  and  a young  tender 
step-mother,  Donna  Albiera,  his  father’s  wife. 

13  Cf.  v.  Seidlitz,  !.  c.  Bd.  II,  p.  274 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


9i 


By  connecting1  this  fact  of  his  childhood  with 
the  one  mentioned  above  and  condensing  them 
into  a uniform  fusion,  the  composition  of  Saint 
Anne,  Mary  and  the  Child,  formed  itself  in  him. 
The  maternal  form  further  away  from  the  boy 
designated  as  grandmother,  corresponds  in  ap- 
pearance and  in  spatial  relation  to  the  boy,  with 
the  real  first  mother,  Caterina.  With  the  bliss- 
ful smile  of  Saint  Anne  the  artist  actually  dis- 
avowed and  concealed  the  envy  which  the  un- 
fortunate mother  felt  when  she  was  forced  to 
give  up  her  son  to  her  more  aristocratic  rival, 
as  once  before  her  lover. 

Our  feeling  that  the  smile  of  Monna  Lisa 
del  Gioconda  awakened  in  the  man  the  memory 
of  the  mother  of  his  first  years  of  childhood 
would  thus  be  confirmed  from  another  work 
of  Leonardo.  Following  the  production  of 
Monna  Lisa,  Italian  artists  depicted  in  Ma- 
donnas and  prominent  ladies  the  humble  dip- 
ping of  the  head  and  the  peculiar  blissful  smile 
of  the  poor  peasant  girl  Caterina,  who  brought 
to  the  world  the  noble  son  who  was  destined  to 
paint,  investigate,  and  suffer. 

When  Leonardo  succeeded  in  reproducing  in 


92 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


the  face  of  Monna  Lisa  the  double  sense  com- 
prised in  this  smile,  namely,  the  promise  of 
unlimited  tenderness,  and  sinister  threat  (in  the 
words  of  Pater),  he  remained  true  even  in  this 
to  the  content  of  his  earliest  reminiscence. 
For  the  love  of  the  mother  became  his  destiny, 
it  determined  his  fate  and  the  privations  which 
were  in  store  for  him.  The  impetuosity  of  the 
caressing  to  which  the  vulture  phantasy  points 
was  only  too  natural.  The  poor  forsaken 
mother  had  to  give  vent  through  mother's  love 
to  all  her  memories  of  love  enjoyed  as  well  as 
to  all  her  yearnings  for  more  affection ; she  was 
forced  to  it,  not  only  in  order  to  compensate 
herself  for  not  having  a husband,  but  also  the 
child  for  not  having  a father  who  wanted  to 
love  it.  In  the  manner  of  all  ungratified 
mothers  she  thus  took  her  little  son  in  place 
of  her  husband,  and  robbed  him  of  a part  of 
his  virility  by  the  too  early  maturing  of  his 
eroticism.  The  love  of  the  mother  for  the 
suckling  whom  she  nourishes  and  cares  for  is 
something  far  deeper  reaching  than  her  later 
affection  for  the  growing  child.  It  is  of  the 
nature  of  a fully  gratified  love  affair,  which 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


93 


fulfills  not  only  all  the  psychic  wishes  but  also 
all  physical  needs,  and  when  it  represents  one 
of  the  forms  of  happiness  attainable  by  man  it 
is  due,  in  no  little  measure,  to  the  possibility  of 
gratifying  without  reproach  also  wish  feelings 
which  were  long  repressed  and  designated  as 
perverse.14  Even  in  the  happiest  recent  mar- 
riage the  father  feels  that  his  child,  especially 
the  little  boy  has  become  his  rival,  and  this 
gives  origin  to  an  antagonism  against  the  fa- 
vorite one  which  is  deeply  rooted  in  the  uncon- 
scious. 

When  in  the  prime  of  his  life  Leonardo  re- 
encountered that  blissful  and  ecstatic  smile  as 
it  had  once  encircled  his  mother’s  mouth  in 
caressing,  he  had  long  been  under  the  ban  of 
an  inhibition,  forbidding  him  ever  again  to 
desire  such  tenderness  from  women’s  lips. 
But  as  he  had  become  a painter  he  endeavored 
to  reproduce  this  smile  with  his  brush  and  fur- 
nish all  his  pictures  with  it,  whether  he  exe- 
cuted them  himself  or  whether  they  were  done 
by  his  pupils  under  his  direction,  as  in  Leda, 

14  Cf.  Three  Contributions  to  the  Theory  of  Sex,  translated 
by  A.  A.  Brill,  2nd  edition,  igi6,  Monograph  series. 


94 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


John,  and  Bacchus.  The  latter  two  are  va- 
riations of  the  same  type,  Muther  says : 
“From  the  locust  eater  of  the  Bible  Leonardo 
made  a Bacchus,  an  Apollo,  who  with  a mys- 
terious smile  on  his  lips,  and  with  his  soft 
thighs  crossed,  looks  on  us  with  infatuated 
eyes  ” These  pictures  breathe  a mysticism 
into  the  secret  of  which  one  dares  not  pene- 
trate; at  most  one  can  make  the  effort  to  con- 
struct the  connection  to  Leonardo's  earlier 
productions.  The  figures  are  again  androgy- 
nous but  no  longer  in- the  sense  of  the  vulture 
phantasy,  they  are  pretty  boys  of  feminine  ten- 
derness with  feminine  forms;  they  do  not  cast 
down  their  eyes  but  gaze  mysteriously  tri- 
umphant, as  if  they  knew  of  a great  happy 
issue  concerning  which  one  must  remain  quiet ; 
the  familiar  fascinating  smile  leads  us  to  infer 
that  it  is  a love  secret.  It  is  possible  that  in 
these  forms  Leonardo  disavowed  and  artisti- 
cally conquered  the  unhappiness  of  his  love 
life,  in  that  he  represented  the  wish  fulfillment 
of  the  boy  infatuated  with  his  mother  in  such 
blissful  union  of  the  male  and  female  nature. 


P-  94] 


JOHN  THE  BAPTIST 


V 

Among  the  entries  in  Leonardo's  diaries 
there  is  one  which  absorbs  the  reader’s  atten- 
tion through  its  important  content  and  on  ac- 
count of  a small  formal  error*  In  July,  1504, 
he  wrote : 

“Adi  9 Luglio,  1504,  mercoledi,  a ore  7 mori 
Ser  Piero  da  Vinci  notalio  al  palazzo  del  Po- 
testa,  mio  padre,  a ore  7.  Era  d’eta  d’anni  80, 
lascio  to  figlioli  maschi  e 2 feminine.”  1 

The  notice  as  we  see  deals  with  the  death  of 
Leonardo’s  father.  The  slight  error  in  its 
form  consists  in  the  fact  that  in  the  computa- 
tion of  the  time  “at  7 o'clock”  is  repeated  two 
times,  as  if  Leonardo  had  forgotten  at  the  end 
of  the  sentence  that  he  had  already  written  it 
at  the  beginning.  It  is  only  a triviality  to 

1 “On  the  9th  of  July,  1504,  Wednesday  at  7 o’clock  died  Ser 
Piero  da  Vmci,  notary  at  the  palace  of  the  Podesta,  my  father, 
at  7 o’clock.  He  was  80  years  o!d;  left.  10  sons  and  2 daugh- 
ters.” (E.  Muntz,  1.  c.  p.  13.) 

95 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


96 

which  any  one  but  a psychoanalyst  would  pay 
no  attention.  Perhaps  he  would  not  even  no- 
tice it,  or  if  his  attention  would  be  called  to  it 
he  would  say  “that  can  happen  to  anybody  dur- 
ing absent-mindedness  or  in  an  affective  state 
and  has  no  further  meaning/5 

The  psychoanalyst  thinks  differently;  to  him 
nothing  is  too  trifling  as  a manifestation  of  hid- 
den psychic  processes ; he  has  long  learned  that 
such  forgetting  or  repetition  Is  full  of  mean- 
ing, and  that  one  is  indebted  to  the  “absent- 
mindedness”  when  it  makes  possible  the  be- 
trayal of  otherwise  concealed  feelings. 

We  would  say  that,  like  the  funeral  account 
of  Caterina  and  the  expense  account  of  the 
pupils,  this  notice,  too,  corresponds  to  a case  in 
which  Leonardo  was  unsuccessful  in  suppress- 
ing his  affects,  and  the  long  hidden  feeling 
forcibly  obtained  a distorted  expression.  Also 
the  form  is  similar,  it  shows  the  same  pedantic 
precision,  the  same  pushing  forward  of  num- 
bers.2 

We  call  such  a repetition  a perseveration. 

2 I shall  overlook  a greater  error  committed  by  Leonardo  in 
his  notice  in  that  he  gives  his  77-year  -old  father  80  years. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


97 


It  is  an  excellent  means  to  indicate  the  affective 
accentuation.  One  recalls  for  example  Saint 
Peter's  angry  speech  against  his  unworthy  rep- 
resentative  on  earth,  as  given  in  Dante's  Para- 
diso:  3 

“Quegli  ch’usurpa  in  terra  il  luoga  mio 
II  luoga  mio,  il  luogo  mio,  che  vaca 
Nella  presenza  del  Figliuol  di  Dio, 

Fatto  ha  del  cimiterio  mio  cloaca.” 

Without  Leonardo's  affective  inhibition  the 
entry  into  the  diary  could  perhaps  have  read  as 
follows:  To-day  at  7 o'clock  died  my  father, 

Ser  Piero  da  Vinci,  my  poor  father ! But  the 
displacement  of  the  perseveration  to  the  most 
indifferent  determination  of  the  obituary  to 
dying-hour  robs  the  notice  of  all  pathos  and  lets 
us  recognize  that  there  was  something  here  to 
conceal  and  to  suppress. 

Ser  Piero  da  Vinci,  notary  and  descendant 
of  notaries,  was  a man  of  great  energy  who  at- 
tained respect  and  affluence.  He  was  married 
four  times,  the  two  first  wives  died  childless, 

3 “He  who  usurps  on  earth  my  place,  my  place,  my  place, 
which  is  void  in  the  presence  of  the  Son  of  God,  has  made  out 
of  my  cemetery  a sewer.”  Canto  XXXVII. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


98 

and  not  till  the  third  marriage  has  he  gotten 
the  first  legitimate  son,  in  1476,  when  Leonardo 
was  24  years  old,  and  had  long  ago  changed 
his  father’s  home  for  the  studio  of  his  master 
Verrocchio.  With  the  fourth  and  last  wife 
whom  he  married  when  he  was  already  in  the 
fifties  he  begot  nine  sons  and  two  daughters.4 

To  be  sure  the  father  also  assumed  impor- 
tance in  Leonardo’s  psychosexual  development, 
and  what  is  more,  it  was  not  only  in  a negative 
sense,  through  his  absence  during  the  boy’s  first 
childhood  years,  but  also  directly  through  his 
presence  in  his  later  childhood.  He  who  as  a 
child  desires  his  mother,  cannot  help  wishing  to 
put  himself  in  his  father’s  place,  to  identify 
himself  with  him  in  his  phantasy  and  later 
make  it  his  life’s  task  to  triumph  over  him. 
As  Leonardo  was  not  yet  five  years  old  when 
he  was  received  into  his  paternal  home,  the 
young  step-mother,  Albiera,  certainly  must 
have  taken  the  place  of  his  mother  in  his  feel- 
ing, and  this  brought  him  into  that  relation  of 

4 It  seems  that  in  that  passage  of  the  diary  Leonardo  also 
erred  in  the  number  of  his  sisters  and  brothers,  which  stands 
in  remarkable  contrast  to  the  apparent  exactness  of  the  same. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


99 


rivalry  to  his  father  which  may  be  designated 
as  normal.  As  is  known,  the  preference  for 
homosexuality  did  not  manifest  itself  till  near 
the  years  of  puberty.  When  Leonardo  ac- 
cepted this  preference  the  identification  with 
the  father  lost  all  significance  for  his  sexual 
life,  but  continued  in  other  spheres  of  non- 
erotic activity.  We  hear  that  he  was  fond  of 
luxury  and  pretty  raiments,  and  kept  servants 
and  horses,  although  according  to  Vasari’s 
words  “he  hardly  possessed  anything  and 
worked  little.”  We  shall  not  hold  his  artistic 
taste  entirely  responsible  for  all  these  special 
likings;  we  recognize  in  them  also  the  compul- 
sion to  copy  his  father  and  to  excel  him.  He 
played  the  part  of  the  great  gentleman  to  the 
poor  peasant  girl,  hence  the  son  retained  the 
incentive  that  he  also  play  the  great  gentleman, 
he  had  the  strong  feeling  “to  out-herod 
Herod,”  and  to  show  his  father  exactly  how 
the  real  high  rank  looks. 

Whoever  works  as  an  artist  certainly  feels 
as  a father  to  his  works.  The  identification 
with  his  father  had  a fateful  result  in  Leo- 
nardo’s works  of  art.  He  created  them  and 


loo 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


then  troubled  himself  no  longer  about  them, 
just  as  his  father  did  not  trouble  himself 
about  him.  The  later  worriments  of  his  father 
could  change  nothing  in  this  compulsion,  as  the 
latter  originated  from  the  impressions  of  the 
first  years  of  childhood,  and  the  repression 
having  remained  unconscious  was  incorrigible 
through  later  experiences. 

At  the  time  of  the  Renaissance,  and  even 
much  later,  every  artist  was  in  need  of  a gen- 
tleman of  rank  to  act  as  his  benefactor.  This 
patron  w<as  wront  to  give  the  artist  commissions 
for  work  and  entirely  controlled  his  destiny. 
Leonardo  found  his  patron  in  Lodovico  Sforza, 
nicknamed  II  Moro,  a man  of  high  aspirations, 
ostentations,  diplomatically  astute,  but  of  an 
unstable  and  unreliable  character.  In  his 
court  in  Milan,  Leonardo  spent  the  best  period 
of  his  life,  while  in  his  service  he  evinced  his 
most  uninhibited  productive  activity  as  is  evi- 
denced in  The  Last  Supper,  and  in  the  eques- 
trian statue  of  Francesco  Sforza.  He  left 
Milan  before  the  catastrophe  struck  Lodovico 
Moro,  who  died  a prisoner  in  a French  prison. 
When  the  news  of  his  benefactor's  fate  reached 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  101 

Leonardo  he  made  the  following  entry  in  his 
diary:  “The  duke  has  lost  state,  wealth,  and 

liberty,  not  one  of  his  works  will  be  finished  by 
himself.”  5 It  is  remarkable  and  surely  not 
without  significance  that  he  here  raises  the 
same  reproach  to  his  benefactor  that  posterity 
was  to  apply  to  him,  as  if  he  wanted  to  lay  the 
responsibility  to  a person  who  substituted  his 
father-series,  for  the  fact  that  he  himself  left 
his  works  unfinished.  As  a matter  of  fact  he 
was  not  wrong  in  what  he  said  about  the  Duke. 

However,  if  the  imitation  of  his  father  hurt 
him  as  an  artist,  his  resistance  against  the 
father  was  the  infantile  determinant  of  his  per- 
haps equally  vast  accomplishment  as  an  artist. 
According  to  Merejkowski’s  beautiful  compari- 
son he  was  like  a man  who  awoke  too  early  in 
the  darkness,  while  the  others  were  all  still 
asleep.  He  dared  utter  this  bold  principle 
which  contains  the  justification  for  all  inde- 
pendent investigation : “Chi  disputa  allegando 

I'autorita  non  adopra  Vingegno  ma  piuttosto  la 
memoria”  (Whoever  refers  to  authorities  in 
disputing  ideas,  works  with  his  memory  rather 

5 v.  Seidlitz,  1.  c.f  II,  p.  270. 


102  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

than  with  his  reason).6  Thus  he  became  the 
first  modern  natural  philosopher,  and  his  cour- 
age was  rewarded  by  an  abundance  of  cogni- 
tions and  suggestions;  since  the  Greek  period 
he  was  the  first  to  investigate  the  secrets  of  na- 
ture, relying  entirely  on  his  observation  and  his 
own  judgment.  But  when  he  learned  to  de- 
preciate authority  and  to  reject  the  imitation 
of  the  “ancients”  and  constantly  pointed  to  the 
study  of  nature  as  the  source  of  all  wisdom,  he 
only  repeated  in  the  highest  sublimation  at- 
tainable to  man,  which  had  already  obtruded 
itself  on  the  little  boy  who  surveyed  the  world 
with  wonder.  To  retranslate  the  scientific  ab- 
stractions into  concrete  individual  experiences, 
we  would  say  that  the  “ancients’*  and  authority 
only  corresponded  to  the  father,  and  nature 
again  became  the  tender  mother  who  nourished 
him.  While  in  most  human  beings  to-day,  as 
in  primitive  times,  the  need  for  a support  of 
some  authority  is  so  imperative  that  their  world 
becomes  shaky  when  their  authority  is  men- 
aced, Leonardo  alone  was  able  to  exist  without 
such  support;  but  that  would  not  have  been 

6 Solmi,  Conf.  fior,  p.  13. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


103 


possible  had  he  not  been  deprived  of  his  fa- 
ther in  the  first  years  of  his  life.  The  bold- 
ness and  independence  of  his  later  scientific 
investigation  presupposes  that  his  infantile  sex- 
ual investigation  was  not  inhibited  by  his  fa- 
ther, and  this  same  spirit  of  scientific  independ- 
ence was  continued  by  his  withdrawing  from 
sex. 

If  any  one  like  Leonardo  escapes  in  his  child- 
hood his  father’s  intimidation  and  later  throws 
off  the  shackles  of  authority  in  his  scientific  in- 
vestigation, it  would  be  in  gross  contradiction 
to  our  expectation  if  we  found  that  this  same 
man  remained  a believer  and  unable  to  with- 
draw from  dogmatic  religion.  Psychoanalysis 
has  taught  us  the  intimate  connection  between 
the  father  complex  and  belief  in  God,  and  daily 
demonstrates  to  us  how  youthful  persons  lose 
their  religious  belief  as  soon  as  the  authority  of 
the  father  breaks  down.  In  the  parental  com- 
plex we  thus  recognize  the  roots  of  religious 
need ; the  almighty,  just  God,  and  kindly  nature 
appear  to  us  as  grand  sublimations  of  father 
and  mother,  or  rather  as  revivals  and  restora- 
tions of  the  infantile  conceptions  of  both  par- 


104 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


ents.  Religiousness  is  biologically  traced  to 
the  long  period  of  helplessness  and  need  of  help 
of  the  little  child.  When  the  child  grows  up 
and  realizes  his  loneliness  and  weakness  in  the 
presence  of  the  great  forces  of  life,  he  perceives 
his  condition  as  in  childhood  and  seeks  to  dis- 
avow his  despair  through  a regressive  revival 
of  the  protecting  forces  of  childhood. 

It  does  not  seem  that  Leonardo’s  life  dis- 
proves this  conception  of  religious  belief.  Ac- 
cusations charging  him  with  irreligiousness, 
which  in  those  times  was  equivalent  to  re- 
nouncing Christianity,  were  brought  against 
him  already  in  his  lifetime,  and  were  clearly 
described  in  the  first  biography  given  by  Va- 
sari.7 In  the  second  edition  of  his  Vite  ( 1568) 
Vasari  left  out  this  observation.  In  view  of 
the  extraordinary  sensitiveness  of  his  age  in 
matters  of  religion  it  is  perfectly  comprehen- 
sible to  us  why  Leonardo  refrained  from  di- 
rectly expressing  his  position  to  Christianity 
in  his  notes.  As  investigator  he  did  not  per- 
mit himself  to  be  misled  by  the  account  of  the 
creation  of  the  holy  scriptures;  for  instance, 

7 Muntz,  1.  c.,  La  Religion  de  Leonardo,  p.  292,  etc. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


105 


he  disputed  the  possibility  of  a universal  flood, 
and  in  geology  he  was  as  unscrupulous  in  cal- 
culating with  hundred  thousands  of  years  as 
modem  investigators. 

Among  his  "prophecies”  one  finds  some 
things  that  would  perforce  offend  the  sensi- 
tive feelings  of  a religious  Christian,  e.g. 
Praying  to  the  images  of  Saints,  reads  as  fol- 
lows ; s 

"People  talk  to  people  who  perceive  nothing, 
who  have  open  eyes  and  see  nothing;  they  shall 
talk  to  them  and  receive  no  answer;  they  shall 
adore  those  who  have  ears  and  hear  nothing; 
they  shall  burn  lamps  for  those  who  do  not 

99 

see. 

Or : Concerning  mourning  on  Good  Friday 

(p.  297): 

"In  all  parts  of  Europe  great  peoples  will  be- 
wail the  death  of  one  man  who  died  in  the 
Orient” 

It  was  asserted  of  Leonardo's  art  that  he 
took  away  the  last  remnant  of  religious  attach- 
ment from  the  holy  figures  and  put  them  into 
human  form  in  order  to  depict  in  them  great 

8 Herzfeld,  p.  292. 


106  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

and  beautiful  human  feelings.  Muther  praises 
him  for  having  overcome  the  feeling  of  deca- 
dence, and  for  having  returned  to  man  the  right 
of  sensuality  and  pleasurable  enjoyment.  The 
notices  which  show  Leonardo  absorbed  in 
fathoming  the  great  riddles  of  nature  do  not 
lack  any  expressions  of  admiration  for  the 
creator,  the  last  cause  of  all  these  wonderful 
secrets,  but  nothing  indicates  that  he  wished 
to  hold  any  personal  relation  to  this  divine 
force.  The  sentences  which  contain  the  deep 
wisdom  of  his  last  years  breathe  the  resigna- 
tion of  the  man  who  subjects  himself  to  the 
laws  of  nature  and  expects  no  alleviation  from 
the  kindness  or  grace  of  God.  There  is  hardly 
any  doubt  that  Leonardo  had  vanquished  dog- 
matic as  well  as  personal  religion,  and  through 
his  work  of  investigation  he  had  withdrawn  far 
from  the  world  aspect  of  the  religious  Chris- 
tian. 

From  our  views  mentioned  before  in  the  de- 
velopment of  the  infantile  psychic  life,  it  be- 
comes clear  that  also  Leonardo's  first  inves- 
tigations in  childhood  occupied  themselves 
with  the  problems  of  sexuality.  But  he  him- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


107 


self  betrays  it  to  us  through  a transparent 
veil,  in  that  he  connects  his  impulse  to  investi- 
gate with  the  vulture  phantasy,  and  in  empha- 
sizing the  problem  of  the  flight  of  the  bird  as 
one  whose  elaboration  devolved  upon  him 
through  special  concatenations  of  fate.  A 
very  obscure  as  well  as  a prophetically  sound- 
ing passage  in  his  notes  dealing  with  the  flight 
of  the  bird  demonstrates  in  the  nicest  way  with 
how  much  affective  interest  he  clung  to  the 
wish  that  he  himself  should  be  able  to  imitate 
the  art  of  flying : “The  human  bird  shall  take 

his  first  flight,  filling  the  world  with  amaze- 
ment, all  writings  with  his  fame,  and  bringing 
eternal  glory  to  the  nest  whence  he  sprang/" 
He  probably  hoped  that  he  himself  would 
sometimes  be  able  to  fly,  and  we  know  from 
the  wish  fulfilling  dreams  of  people  what  bliss 
one  expects  from  the  fulfillment  of  this  hope. 

But  why  do  so  many  people  dream  that  they 
are  able  to  fly?  Psychoanalysis  answers  this 
question  by  stating  that  to  fly  or  to  be  a bird 
in  the  dream  is  only  a concealment  of  another 
wish,  to  the  recognition  of  which  one  can  reach 
by  more  than  one  linguistic  or  objective  bridge. 


108  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

When  the  inquisitive  child  is  told  that  a big 
bird  like  the  stork  brings  the  little  children, 
when  the  ancients  have  formed  the  phallus 
winged,  when  the  popular  designation  of  the 
sexual  activity  of  man  is  expressed  in  Ger- 
man by  the  word  “to  bird”  (vogeln),  when  the 
male  member  is  directly  called  l’ uccello  (bird) 
by  the  Italians,  all  these  facts  are  only  small 
fragments  from  a large  collection  which 
teaches  us  that  the  wish  to  be  able  to  fly  signi- 
fies in  the  dream  nothing  more  or  less  than  the 
longing  for  the  ability  of  sexual  accomplish- 
ment. This  is  an  early  infantile  wish.  When 
the  grown-up  recalls  his  childhood  it  appears  to 
him  as  a happy  time  in  which  one  is  happy  for 
the  moment  and  looks  to  the  future  without 
any  wishes,  it  is  for  this  reason  that  he  envies 
children.  But  if  children  themselves  could  in- 
form us  about  it  they  would  probably  give  dif- 
ferent reports.  It  seems  that  childhood  is  not 
that  blissful  Idyl  into  which  we  later  distort 
it,  that  on  the  contrary  children  are  lashed 
through  the  years  of  childhood  by  the  wish  to 
become  big,  and  to  imitate  the  grown  ups. 
This  wish  instigates  all  their  playing.  If  in 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


log 


the  course  of  their  sexual  investigation  chil- 
dren feel  that  the  grown  up  knows  something 
wonderful  in  the  mysterious  and  yet  so  im- 
portant realm,  what  they  are  prohibited  from 
knowing  or  doing,  they  are  seized  with  a vio- 
lent wish  to  know  it,  and  dream  of  it  in  the 
form  of  flying,  or  prepare  this  disguise  of  the 
wish  for  their  later  flying  dreams.  Thus  avia- 
tion, which  has  attained  its  aim  in  our  times, 
has  also  its  infantile  erotic  roots. 

By  admitting  that  he  entertained  a special 
personal  relation  to  the  problem  of  flying  since 
his  childhood,  Leonardo  bears  out  what  we 
must  assume  from  our  investigation  of  chil- 
dren of  our  times,  namely,  that  his  childhood 
investigation  was  directed  to  sexual  matters. 
At  least  this  one  problem  escaped  the  repres- 
sion which  has  later  estranged  him  from  sex- 
uality. From  childhood  until  the  age  of  per- 
fect intellectual  maturity  this  subject,  slightly 
varied,  continued  to  hold  his  interest,  and  it  is 
quite  possible  that  he  was  as  little  successful 
in  his  cherished  art  in  the  primary  sexual  sense 
as  in  his  desires  for  mechanical  matters,  that 
both  wishes  were  denied  to  him. 


1 IO 


LEONARDO  DA  VINd 


As  a matter  of  fact  the  great  Leonardo  re- 
mained infantile  in  some  ways  throughout  his 
whole  life;  it  is  said  that  all  great  men  retain 
something  of  the  infantile.  As  a grown  up  he 
still  continued  playing*,  which  sometimes  made 
him  appear  strange  and  incomprehensible  to 
his  contemporaries.  When  he  constructed  the 
most  artistic  mechanical  toys  for  court  festivi- 
ties and  receptions  we  are  dissatisfied  thereby 
because  we  dislike  to  see  the  master  waste  his 
power  on  such  petty  stuff.  He  himself  did  not 
seem  averse  to  giving  his  time  to  such  things. 
Vasari  reports  that  he  did  similar  things  even 
when  not  urged  to  it  by  request:  “There  (in 

Rome)  he  made  a doughy  mass  out  of  wax, 
and  when  it  softened  he  formed  thereof  very 
delicate  animals  filled  with  air;  when  he  blew 
into  them  they  dew  in  the  air,  and  when  the 
air  was  exhausted  they  fell  to  the  ground.  For 
a peculiar  lizard  caught  by  the  wine-grower 
of  Belvedere  Leonardo  made  wings  from  skin 
pulled  off  from  other  lizards,  which  he  filled 
with  mercury  so  that  they  moved  and  trem- 
bled when  it  walked;  he  then  made  for  it  eyes, 
a beard  and  horns,  tamed  it  and  put  it  in  a lit- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


ill 


tie  box  and  terrified  all  his  friends  with  it.”  9 
Such  playing  often  served  him  as  an  expression 
of  serieus  thoughts:  “He  had  often  cleaned 

the  intestines  of  a sheep  so  well  that  one  could 
hold  them  in  the  hollow  of  the  hand ; he  brought 
them  into  a big  room,  and  attached  them  to 
a blacksmith's  bellows  which  he  kept  in  an  ad- 
jacent room,  he  then  blew  them  up  until  they 
filled  up  the  whole  room  so  that  everybody 
had  to  crowd  into  a corner.  Tn  this  manner 
he  showed  how  they  gradually  became  trans- 
parent and  filled  up  with  air,  and  as  they  were 
at  first  limited  to  very  little  space  and  grad- 
ually became  more  and  more  extended  in  the 
big  room,  he  compared  them  to  a genius.”  10 
His  fables  and  riddles  evince  the  same  playful 
pleasure  in  harmless  concealment  and  artistic 
investment,  the  riddles  were  put  into  the  form 
of  prophecies;  almost  all  are  rich  in  ideas  and 
to  a remarkable  degree  devoid  of  wit. 

The  plays  and  jumps  which  Leonardo  al- 
lowed his  phantasy  have  in  some  cases  quite 
misled  his  biographers  who  misunderstood  this 

9 Vasari,  translated  by  Scborn,  1843. 

10  Ebend8,  p.  39. 


112 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


part  of  his  nature.  In  Leonardo’s  Milanese 
manuscripts  one  finds,  for  example,  outlines 
of  letters  to  the  “Diodario  of  Sorio  (Syria), 
viceroy  of  the  holy  Sultan  of  Babylon,”  in 
which  Leonardo  presents  himself  as  an  en- 
gineer sent  to  these  regions  of  the  Orient  in 
order  to  construct  some  works.  In  these  let- 
ters he  defends  himself  against  the  reproach 
of  laziness,  he  furnishes  geographical  descrip- 
tions of  cities  and  mountains,  and  finally  dis- 
cusses a big  elementary  event  which  occurred 
while  he  was  there.11 

In  1881,  J.  P.  Richter  had  endeavored  to 
prove  from  these  documents  that  Leonardo 
made  these  traveler’s  observations  when  he 
really  was  in  the  service  of  the  Sultan  of  Egypt, 
and  that  while  in  the  Orient  he  embraced  the 
Mohammedan  religion.  This  sojourn  in  the 
Orient  should  have  taken  place  in  the  time  of 
1483,  that  is,  before  he  removed  to  the  court 
of  the  Duke  of  Milan.  However,  it  was  not 
difficult  for  other  authors  to  recognize  the  il- 

,l  Concerning  these  letters  and  the  combinations  connected 
with  them  see  Miintr,  1.  c.,  p.  82;  for  the  wording  of  the  same 
and  for  the  notices  connected  with  them  see  Iierzfeld,  L e., 
P*  223. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


113 


lustrations  of  this  supposed  journey  to  the 
Orient  as  what  they  really  were,  namely,  phan- 
tastic  productions  of  the  youthful  artist  which 
he  created  for  his  own  amusement,  and  in 
which  he  probably  brought  to  expression  his 
wishes  to  see  the  world  and  experience  adven- 
tures. 

A phantastic  formation  is  probably  also  the 
“Academia  Vinciana,”  the  acceptance  of  which 
is  due  to  the  existence  of  five  or  six  most  clever 
and  intricate  emblems  with  the  inscription  of 
the  Academy.  Vasari  mentions  these  draw- 
ings but  not  the  Academy.12  Miintz  who 
placed  such  ornament  on  the  cover  of  his  big 
work  on  Leonardo  belongs  to  the  few  who 
believe  in  the  reality  of  an  “Academia  Vin- 
ciana.” 

It  is  probable  that  this  impulse  to  play  dis- 
appeared in  Leonardo’s  maturer  years,  that  it 
became  discharged  in  the  investigating  activity 

12  Besides,  he  lost  some  time  in  that  he  even  made  a drawing 
of  a braided  cord  in  which  one  could  follow  the  thread  from 
one  end  to  the  other,  until  it  formed  a perfectly  circular  figure : 
a very  difficult  and  beautiful  drawing  of  this  kind  is  engraved 
on  copper,  in  the  center  of  it  one  can  read  the  words : “Leo- 
nardus  Vinci  Academia”  ( p,  8). 


114 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


which  signified  the  highest  development  of  his 
personality.  But  the  fact  that  it  continued  so 
long  rnay  teach  us  how  slowly  one  tears  himself 
away  from  his  infantilism  after  having  en- 
joyed in  his  childhood  supreme  erotic  happiness 
which  is  later  unattainable- 


VI 

It  would  be  futile  to  delude  ourselves  that  at 
present,  readers  find  every  pathography  un- 
savory. This  attitude  is  excused  with  the  re- 
proach that  from  a pathographic  elaboration 
of  a great  man  one  never  obtains  an  under- 
standing of  his  importance  and  his  attainments, 
that  it  is  therefore  useless  mischief  to  study 
in  him  things  which  could  just  as  well  be  found 
in  the  first  comer.  However,  this  criticism  is 
so  clearly  unjust  that  it  can  only  be  grasped 
when  viewed  as  a pretext  and  a disguise  for 
something.  As  a matter  of  fact  pathography 
does  not  aim  at  making  comprehensible  the  at- 
tainments of  the  great  man;  no  one  should 
really  be  blamed  for  not  doing  something  which 
one  never  promised.  The  real  motives  for  the 
opposition  are  quite  different.  One  finds  them 
when  one  bears  in  mind  that  biographers  are 
fixed  on  their  heroes  in  quite  a peculiar  manner. 

ns 


n6  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

Frequently  they  take  the  hero  as  the  object  of 
study  because,  for  reasons  of  their  personal 
emotional  life,  they  bear  him  a special  affec- 
tion from  the  very  outset.  They  then  devote 
themselves  to  a work  of  idealization  which 
strives  .to  enroll  the  great  men  among  their  in- 
fantile models,  and  to  revive  through  him,  as 
it  were,  the  infantile  conception  of  the  father. 
For  the  sake  of  this  wish  they  wipe  out  the  in- 
dividual features  in  his  physiognomy,  they  rub 
out  the  traces  of  his  life's  struggle  with  inner 
and  outer  resistances,  and  do  not  tolerate  in 
him  anything  of  human  weakness  or  imperfec- 
tion; they  then  give  as  a cold,  strange,  ideal 
form  instead  of  the  man  to  whom  we  could  feel 
distantly  related.  It  is  to  be  regretted  that 
they  do  this,  for  they  thereby  sacrifice  the  truth 
to  an  illusion,  and  for  the  sake  of  their  infan- 
tile phantasies  they  let  slip  the  opportunity  to 
penetrate  into  the  most  attractive  secrets  of  hu- 
man nature.1 

Leonardo  himself,  judging  from  his  love  for 
the  truth  and  his  inquisitiveness,  would  have 

1 This  criticism  holds  quite  generally  and  is  not  aimed  at 
Leonardo's  biographers  in  particular. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


U7 


interposed  no  objections  to  the  effort  of  dis- 
covering the  determinations  of  his  psychic  and 
intellectual  development  from  the  trivial  pe- 
culiarities and  riddles  of  his  nature.  We  re- 
spect him  by  learning  from  him.  It  does  no 
injury  to  his  greatness  to  study  the  sacrifices 
which  his  development  from  the  child  must 
have  entailed,  and  to  the  compile  factors  which 
have  stamped  on  his  person  the  tragic  feature 
of  failure. 

Let  us  expressly  emphasize  that  we  have 
never  considered  Leonardo  as  a neurotic  or  as 
a “nervous  person15  in  the  sense  of  this  awk- 
ward term.  Whoever  takes  it  amiss  that  we 
should  even  dare  apply  to  him  viewpoints 
gained  from  pathology,  still  clings  to  preju- 
dices which  we  have  at  present  justly  given  up. 
We  no  longer  believe  that  health  and  disease, 
normal  and  nervous,  are  sharply  distinguished 
from  each  other,  and  that  neurotic  traits  must 
be  judged  as  proof  of  general  inferiority.  We 
know  to-day  that  neurotic  symptoms  are  sub- 
stitutive formations  for  certain  repressive  acts 
which  have  to  be  brought  about  in  the  course 
of  our  development  from  the  child  to  the  cul- 


u8  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

tural  man,  that  we  all  produce  such  substitu- 
tive formations,  and  that  only  the  amount,  in- 
tensity, and  distribution  of  these  substitutive 
formations  justify  the  practical  conception  of 
illness  and  the  conclusion  of  constitutional  in- 
feriority. Following  the  slight  signs  in  Leo- 
nardo’s personality  we  would  place  him  near 
that  neurotic  type  which  we  designate  as  the 
“compulsive  type,”  and  we  would  compare  his 
investigation  with  the  “reasoning  mania”  of 
neurotics,  and  his  inhibitions  with  the  so-called 
“abulias”  of  the  latter. 

The  object  of  our  work  was  to  explain  the 
inhibitions  in  Leonardo's  sexual  life  and  in  his 
artistic  activity.  For  this  purpose  we  shall 
now  sum  up  what  we  could  discover  concern- 
ing the  course  of  his  psychic  development. 

We  were  unable  to  gain  any  knowledge  about 
his  hereditary  factors,  on  the  other  hand  we 
recognize  that  the  accidental  circumstances  of 
his  childhood  produced  a far  reaching  disturb- 
ing effect.  His  illegitimate  birth  deprived  him 
of  the  influence  of  a father  until  perhaps  his 
fifth  year,  and  left  him  to  the  tender  seduction 
of  a mother  whose  only  consolation  he  was. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


119 


Having  been  kissed  by  her  into  sexual  prema- 
turity, he  surely  must  have  entered  into  a phase 
of  infantile  sexual  activity  of  which  only  one 
single  manifestation  was  definitely  evinced, 
namely,  the  intensity  of  his  infantile  sexual 
investigation.  The  impulse  for  looking  and 
inquisitiveness  were  most  strongly  stimulated 
by  his  impressions  from  early  childhood;  the 
enormous  mouth-zone  received  its  accentuation 
which  it  had  never  given  up.  From  his  later 
contrasting  behavior,  as  the  exaggerated  sym- 
pathy for  animals,  we  can  conclude  that  this 
infantile  period  did  not  lack  in  strong  sadistic 
traits. 

An  energetic  shift  of  repression  put  an  end 
to  this  infantile  excess,  and  established  the  dis- 
positions which  became  manifest  in  the  years 
of  puberty.  The  most  striking  result  of  this 
transformation  was  a turning  away  from  all 
gross  sensual  activities.  Leonardo  was  able  to 
lead  a life  of  abstinence  and  made  the  impres- 
sion of  an  asexual  person.  When  the  floods 
of  pubescent  excitement  came  over  the  boy  they 
did  not  make  him  ill  by  forcing  him  to  costly 
and  harmful  substitutive  formations;  owing  to 


120 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


the  early  preference  for  sexual  inquisitiveness, 
the  greater  part  of  the  sexual  needs  could  be 
sublimated  into  a general  thirst  after  knowl- 
edge and  so  elude  repression.  A much  smaller 
portion  of  the  libido  was  applied  to  sexual  aims, 
and  represented  the  stunted  sexual  life  of  the 
grown  up.  In  consequence  of  the  repression 
of  the  love  for  the  mother  this  portion  assumed 
a homosexual  attitude  and  manifested  itself  as 
ideal  love  for  boys.  The  fixation  on  the 
mother,  as  well  as  the  happy  reminiscences  of 
his  relations  with  her,  was  preserved  in  his  un- 
conscious but  remained  for  the  time  in  an  in- 
active state.  In  this  manner  the  repression, 
fixation,  and  sublimation  participated  in  the 
disposal  of  the  contributions  which  the  sex- 
ual impulse  furnished  to  Leonardo's  psychic 
life. 

From  the  obscure  age  of  boyhood  Leonardo 
appears  to  us  as  an  artist,  a painter,  and  sculp- 
tor, thanks  to  a specific  talent  which  was  prob- 
ably enforced  by  the  early  awakening  of  the  im- 
pulse for  looking  in  the  first  years  of  childhood. 
We  would  gladly  report  in  what  way  the  artis- 
tic activity  depends  on  the  psychic  primitive 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


121 


forces  were  it  not  that  our  material  is  inade- 
quate just  here.  We  content  ourselves  by  em- 
phasizing the  fact,  concerning  which  hardly 
any  doubt  still  exists,  that  the  productions  of 
the  artist  give  outlet  also  to  his  sexual  desire, 
and  in  the  case  of  Leonardo  we  can  refer  to  the 
information  imparted  by  Vasari,  namely,  that 
heads  of  laughing  women  and  pretty  boys,  or 
representations  of  his  sexual  objects,  attracted 
attention  among  his  first  artistic  attempts.  It 
seems  that  during  his  flourishing  youth  Leo- 
nardo at  first  worked  in  an  uninhibited  manner. 
As  he  took  his  father  as  a model  for  his  outer 
conduct  in  life,  he  passed  through  a period  of 
manly  creative  power  and  artistic  productivity 
in  Milan,  where  favored  by  fate  he  found  a sub- 
stitute for  his  father  in  the  duke  Lodovico 
Moro.  But  the  experience  of  others  was  soon 
confirmed  in  him,  to  wit.  that  the  almost  com- 
plete suppression  of  the  real  sexual  life  does 
not  furnish  the  most  favorable  conditions  for 
the  activity  of  the  sublimated  sexual  strivings. 
The  figurativeness  of  his  sexual  life  asserted 
itself,  his  activity  and  ability  to  quick  decisions 
began  to  weaken,  the  tendency  to  reflection  and 


122  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

delay  was  already  noticeable  as  a disturbance 
in  The  Holy  Supper,  and  with  the  influence  of 
the  technique  determined  the  fate  of  this  mag- 
nificent work.  Slowly  a process  developed  in 
him  which  can  be  put  parallel  only  to  the  re- 
gressions of  neurotics.  His  development  at 
puberty  into  the  artist  was  outstripped  by  the 
early  infantile  determinant  of  the  investigator, 
the  second  sublimation  of  his  erotic  impulses 
turned  back  to  the  primitive  one  which  was  pre- 
pared at  the  first  repression.  He  became  an 
investigator,  first  in  service  of  his  art,  later 
independently  and  away  from  his  art.  With 
the  loss  of  his  patron,  the  substitute  for  his  fa- 
ther, and  with  the  increasing  difficulties  in  his 
life,  the  regressive  displacement  extended  in 
dimension.  He  became  “ impacientissimo  al 
pennello ” (most  impatient  with  the  brush)  as 
reported  by  a correspondent  of  the  countess 
Isabella  d'Este  who  desired  to  possess  at  any 
cost  a painting  from  his  hand.2  His  infantile 
past  had  obtained  control  over  him.  The  in- 
vestigation, however,  which  now  took  the  place 
of  his  artistic  production,  seems  to  have  born 

2 Seidlitz  II,  p.  271. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


123 


certain  traits  which  betrayed  the  activity  of  un- 
conscious impulses;  this  was  seen  in  his  in- 
satiability, his  regardless  obstinacy,  and  in  his 
lack  of  ability  to  adjust  himself  to  actual  con- 
ditions. 

At  the  summit  of  his  life,  in  the  age  of  the 
first  fifties,  at  a time  when  the  sex  characteris- 
tics of  ihe  woman  have  already  undergone  a 
regressive  change,  and  when  the  libido  in  the 
man  not  infrequently  ventures  into  an  ener- 
getic advance,  a new  transformation  came  over 
him.  Still  deeper  strata  of  his  psychic  content 
became  active  again,  but  this  further  regres- 
sion was  of  benefit  to  his  art  which  was  in  a 
state  of  deterioration.  He  met  the  woman 
who  awakened  in  him  the  memory  of  the  happy 
and  sensuously  enraptured  smile  of  his  mother, 
and  under  the  influence  of  this  awakening  he 
acquired  back  the  stimulus  which  guided  him 
in  the  beginning  of  his  artistic  efforts  when  he 
formed  the  smiling  woman.  He  painted 
Monna  Lisa,  Saint  Anne,  and  a number  of 
mystic  pictures  which  were  characterized  by 
the  enigmatic  smile.  With  the  help  of  his  old- 
est erotic  feelings  he  triumphed  in  conquering 


124 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


once  more  the  inhibition  in  his  art.  This  last 
development  faded  away  in  the  obscurity  of  the 
approaching  old  age.  But  before  this  his  in- 
tellect rose  to  the  highest  capacity  of  a view  of 
life,  which  was  far  in  advance  of  his  time. 

In  the  preceding  chapters  I have  shown  what 
justification  one  may  have  for  such  represen- 
tation of  Leonardo’s  course  of  development, 
for  this  manner  of  arranging  his  life  and  ex- 
plaining his  wavering  between  art  and  science. 
If  after  accomplishing  these  things  I should 
provoke  the  criticism  from  even  friends  and 
adepts  of  psychoanalysis,  that  I have  only  writ- 
ten a psychoanalytic  romance,  1 should  answer 
that  I certainly  did  not  overestimate  the  relia- 
bility of  these  results.  Like  others  I suc- 
cumbed to  the  attraction  emanating  from  this 
great  and  mysterious  rnan,  in  whose  being  one 
seems  to  feel  powerful  propelling  passions, 
which  after  all  can  only  evince  themselves  so 
remarkably  subdued. 

But  whatever  may  be  the  truth  about  Leo- 
nardo’s life  we  cannot  relinquish  our  effort  to 
investigate  it  psychoanalytically  before  we  have 
finished  another  task.  In  general  we  must 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


125 


mark  out  the  limits  which  are  set  up  for  the 
working  capacity  of  psychoanalysis  in  biog- 
raphy so  that  every  omitted  explanation  should 
not  be  held  up  to  11s  as  a failure.  Psycho- 
analytic investigation  has  at  its  disposal  the 
data  of  the  history  of  the  person's  life,  which 
on  the  one  hand  consists  of  accidental  events 
and  environmental  influences,  and  on  the  other 
hand  of  the  reported  reactions  of  the  individ- 
ual. Rased  on  the  knowledge  of  psychic  mech- 
anisms it  now  seeks  to  investigate  dynamically 
the  character  of  the  individual  from  his  reac- 
tions, and  to  lay  bare  his  earliest  psychic  motive 
forces  as  well  as  their  later  transformations 
and  developments.  If  this  succeeds  then  the 
reaction  of  the  personality  is  explained  through 
the  cooperation  of  constitutional  and  accidental 
factors  or  through  inner  and  outer  forces.  If 
such  an  undertaking,  as  perhaps  in  the  case  of 
Leonardo,  does  not  yield  definite  results  then 
the  blame  for  it  is  not  to  be  laid  to  the  faulty 
or  inadequate  psychoanalytic  method,  but  to 
the  vague  and  fragmentary  material  left  by 
tradition  about  this  person.  It  is,  therefore, 
only  the  author  who  forced  psychoanalysis  to 


3 26 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


furnish  an  expert  opinion  on  such  insufficient 
material,  who  is  to  be  held  responsible  for  the 
failure. 

However,  even  if  one  had  at  his  disposal  a 
very  rich  historical  material  and  could  manage 
the  psychic  mechanism  with  the  greatest  cer- 
tainty, a psychoanalytic  investigation  could  not 
possibly  furnish  the  definite  view,  if  it  con- 
cerns two  important  questions,  that  the  individ- 
ual could  turn  out  only  so  and  not  differently. 
Concerning  Leonardo  we  had  to  represent  the 
view  that  the  accident  of  his  illegitimate  birth 
and  the  pampering  of  his  mother  exerted  the 
most  decisive  influence  on  his  character  forma- 
tion and  his  later  fate,  through  the  fact  that 
the  sexual  repression  following  this  infantile 
phase  caused  him  to  sublimate  his  libido  into 
a thirst  after  knowledge,  and  thus  determined 
his  sexual  inactivity  for  his  entire  later  life. 
The  repression,  however,  which  followed  the 
first  erotic  gratification  of  childhood  did  not 
have  to  take  place,  in  another  individual  it 
would  perhaps  not  have  taken  place  or  it  would 
have  turned  out  not  nearly  as  profuse.  We 
must  recognize  here  a degree  of  freedom  which 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


127 


can  no  longer  be  solved  psychoanalytically. 
One  is  as  little  justified  in  representing  the  issue 
of  this  shift  of  repression  as  the  only  possible 
issue.  It  is  quite  probable  that  another  person 
would  not  have  succeeded  in  withdrawing  the 
main  part  of  his  libido  from  the  repression 
through  sublimation  into  a desire  for  knowl- 
edge; under  the  same  influences  as  Leonardo 
another  person  might  have  sustained  a per- 
manent injury  to  his  intellectual  work  or  an 
uncontrollable  disposition  to  compulsion  neuro- 
sis. The  two  characteristics  of  Leonardo 
which  remained  unexplained  through  psycho- 
analytic effort  are  first,  his  particular  tendency 
to  repress  his  impulses,  and  second,  his  extraor- 
dinary ability  to  sublimate  the  primitive  im- 
pulses. 

The  impulses  and  their  transformations  are 
the  last  things  that  psychoanalysis  can  discern. 
Henceforth  it  leaves  the  place  to  biological  in- 
vestigation. The  tendency  to  repression,  as 
well  as  the  ability  to  sublimate,  must  be  traced 
back  to  the  organic  bases  of  the  character,  upon 
which  alone  the  psychic  structure  springs  up. 
As  artistic  talent  and  productive  ability  are 


128 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


intimately  connected  with  sublimation  we  have 
to  admit  that  also  the  nature  of  artistic  attain- 
ment is  psychoanalytically  inaccessible  to  us. 
Biological  investigation  of  our  time  endeavors 
to  explain  the  chief  traits  of  the  organic  con- 
stitution of  a person  through  the  fusion  of  male 
and  female  predispositions  in  the  material 
sense;  Leonardo's  physical  beauty  as  well  as 
his  left-handedness  furnish  here  some  support. 
However,  we  do  not  wish  to  leave  the  ground 
of  pure  psychologic  investigation.  Our  aim 
remains  to  demonstrate  the  connection  between 
outer  experiences  and  reactions  of  the  person 
over  the  path  of  the  activity  of  the  impulses. 
Even  if  psychoanalysis  does  not  explain  to  us 
the  fact  of  Leonardo's  artistic  accomplishment, 
it  still  gives  us  an  understanding  of  the  expres- 
sions and  limitations  of  the  same.  It  does 
seem  as  if  only  a man  with  Leonardo's  child- 
hood experiences  could  have  painted  Monna 
Lisa  and  Saint  Anne,  and  could  have  supplied 
his  works  with  that  sad  fate  and  so  obtain  un- 
heard of  fame  as  a natural  historian ; it  seems 
as  if  the  key  to  all  his  attainments  and  failures 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


129 

was  hidden  in  the  childhood  phantasy  of  the 
vulture. 

But  may  one  not  take  offense  at  the  results 
of  an  investigation  which  concede  to  the  acci- 
dents of  the  parental  constellation  so  decisive 
an  influence  on  the  fate  of  a person,  which,  for 
example,  subordinates  Leonardo’s  fate  to  his 
illegitimate  birth  and  to  the  sterility  of  his  first 
step-mother  Donna  Albiera?  I believe  that 
one  has  no  right  to  fed  vSo;  if  one  considers 
accident  as  unworthy  of  determining  our  fate, 
it  is  only  a relapse  to  the  pious  aspect  of  life, 
the  overcoming  of  which  Leonardo  himself 
prepared  when  he  put  down  in  writing  that  the 
sun  does  not  move.  We  are  naturally  grieved 
over  the  fact  that  a just  God  and  a kindly  provi- 
dence do  not  guard  us  better  against  such  in- 
fluences in  our  most  defenseless  age.  We 
thereby  gladly  forget  that  as  a matter  of  fact 
everything  in  our  life  is  accident  from  our  very 
origin  through  the  meeting  of  spermatozoa  and 
ovum,  accident,  which  nevertheless  participates 
in  the  lawfulness  and  fatalities  of  nature,  and 
lacks  only  the  connection  to  our  wishes  and 


130  LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 

illusions.  The  division  of  life’s  determinants 
into  the  “fatalities”  of  our  constitution  and  the 
“accidents”  of  our  childhood  may  still  be  in- 
definite in  individual  cases,  but  taken  alto- 
gether one  can  no  longer  entertain  any  doubt 
about  the  importance  of  precisely  our  first 
years  of  childhood.  We  all  still  show  too  little 
respect  for  nature,  which  in  Leonardo’s  deep 
words  recalling  Hamlet’s  speech  “is  full  of  in- 
finite reasons  which  never  appeared  in  experi- 
ence."  3 Every  one  of  us  human  beings  cor- 
responds to  one  of  the  infinite  experiments  in 
which  these  “reasons  of  nature”  force  them 
selves  into  experience. 

3 La  natura  e piena  ^’infinite  ragione  che  non  furono  mai  in 
isperienza,  M.  Herzfeld*  1.  c.  p.  u. 


THE  END 


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